Question

I am building a toy Rails app. I generated a scaffold for my Post objects. Now, I want to add some search functionality to the scaffold generated view. I am following http://railscasts.com/episodes/37-simple-search-form to add the search functionality.

To app/views/posts/index.html.erb I add

<% form_tag posts_path, :method => 'get' do %>
  <p>
     <%= text_field_tag :search, params[:search]   %>
     <%= submit_tag "Search", :name => nil %>
  </p>
<% end %>

and then the code for listings follow.

In controllers/posts_controller.rb I have

class PostsController < ApplicationController
  # GET /posts
  # GET /posts.json
  def index
    @posts = Post.search(params[:search])
    respond_to do |format|
      format.html # index.html.erb
      format.json { render json: @posts }
    end
  end

In model/post.rb I have

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_accessible :description, :image_url, :title
        validates :name, :presence => true
        validates :title, :presence => true,
                        :length => { :minimum => 5 }
  def self.search(search)
        if search
                find(:all, :conditions => ['name LIKE?', "%#{$search}%"])
        else
                find(:all)
        end
  end
end

When I run the server, I don’t get any errors, but the form doesn’t show up. I looked at the generated page source, and there is no form there. What is going on? Is there a way to debug situations like these?

Answer 1

Since Rails 3 the form_tag helper itself return the html it produces. The equal sign is needed. So please change the first line to

<%= form_tag posts_path, :method => 'get' do %>

That was different in Rails 2. As the railscasts episode is quite old you may run into other issues as well.

See the Rails API as well.

Good luck.