Question

I am trying to pass an extra variable, that determines whether or not the user has clicked on a particular checkbox, and this variable is not a part of my model. I want to make it so on the controller update function, it can have access to this variable, and see what it was set to. I have seen some other stack overflow answers for this type of problem, and it is generally suggested to do something using hidden_field_tag, something like this:

<% hidden_field_tag "blah", params[:test] %>

or

<% hidden_field_tag :example, "test" %>

When trying this, I did a params.inspect and could not find the “test” param variable, using both of the above options. Should I be trying to retrieve this hidden field tag in a different way? Will it be available in the update request to the controller? If not, does anyone know some way this is possible?

Open to any suggestions,

–Anthony

Answer 1

You would either do it like this

<%= hidden_field_tag 'test' , 'blah' %>

or you could do this

<%= hidden_field_tag :whatever_you_want , 'blah', {:name=>'test'}

You had the name and value reversed in your post. The really important thing is to make sure the form element has the name you want to show up in the params hash. The second example would generate the element with id=’whatever_you_want’ name=’test’.