Question

I have a question about forms. I have a fairly standard form that saves a post (called an eReport in my app) with a title and body. The table also has a “published” field, which is boolean. The saved eReport only shows on the public site if this field is set to true, with false being the default.

Rather than the default check box, I would like to display two buttons at the end of the form: a “Publish Now” button and a “Save as Draft” button. If the user presses the former, the published field would be set to true. If the latter, then false. In PHP, I used to display 2 submit fields with different name values, then handle the input with an if/else statement to determine the proper SQL query to build. In Rails, I’m assuming I would place this logic in the controller, under the appropriate action, but I’m not sure how to manipulate the name or id values of buttons.

For the record, I’m using Formtastic, but if someone could show me how to do this with the default Rails form tags, that’s OK too. Here’s the code for my form as it stands right now:

<% semantic_form_for @ereport do |form| %>

  <% form.inputs do %>
    <%= form.input :title %>
    <%= form.input :body %>
  <% end %>
  <% form.buttons do %>
    <%= form.commit_button :label => "Publish Now" %>
<%= form.commit_button :label => "Save as Draft" %>
  <% end %>
<% end %>

Thanks in advance for the help!

Answer 1

I don’t know about formtastic, but with the default rails form builder, you could do it like this:

<%= form.submit "Save with option A", :name => "save_option_a" %>
<%= form.submit "Save with option B", :name => "save_option_b" %>

Then in the controller, you can pick those up in params:

if params[:save_option_a]
  # do stuff
end