Question

I am new to Ruby and Rails.

I made a simple application where the index page diaplays a Cars table with columns for make, model, and type (sportscar, SUV, luxury).

I have made it so I can click a column header and sort by that column

I also added a form above the table with a checkbox for each car type where the user can check/uncheck the boxes and click ‘submit’ and the table will only show cars with the types that were checked.

What I want to be able to do is sort by some column, and then check some boxes/click submit and show the result with the list still sorted AND also filtered.

Right now, I can either sort or filter, but if I do one action my application forgets about the previous action.

What is the RESTful way to do this?

Should I keep the ‘settings’ in the session hash, and construct a URI from that every time the user makes a new HTTP request?

Answer 1

What’s wrong with including sort/filter parameters in the request URI? For example, when you submit the filter form for make of “honda”, the uri will be something like /cars?filter[make]=honda. If you also include sort options, the uri could be /cars?filter[make]=honda&sort_by=make.

Inside your controller, you could access these through the params hash:

class CarsController < ApplicationController
  def index
    @filter = params[:filter]  || {}
    @order  = params[:sort_by] || "created_at"

    @cars = Car.where(@filter).order(@order)
  end
end

You can generate these uri’s by including the parameters in path helpers in your views:

link_to "Only show hondas", cars_path(:sort_by => @order, :filter => {:make => "honda"})
link_to "Sort by year",     cars_path(:sort_by => :year,  :filter => @filter)

This way, @filter and @order will be “persisted” between requests unless you explicitly change them. (These links are not DRY… you should generate them dynamically).