Question

I have a Sinatra app which loads information from an external API and displays it on a page. This is done in Sinatra which gets the information and puts it a temporary model instance (which is NOT saved), so it is easier to access all its propertys in the view.

Now when the user clicks a link I want the model instance to be saved to the database, which I think only can be done via AJAX etc. because the last request already finished and none of the instances is still alive. I thought I needed to extract all the information of the corresponding HTML elements and make an AJAX-Post to another route.

My problem is now, I want to be able to create(and save) the model using @model = Model.create(params[:model]). It would be clear what to do using a form, but that is not an option because all the data is displayed within a table and each table row is one instance of the model.

How do I serialize the data from the table row in which the clicked link is, so I can use it as described above?

UPDATE

• I am using MULTIPLE instances of the object class, each in one tablerow!
• I am using DataMapper, only the temporary objects are not stored!
• I dont want to clutter up my whole setup!

Answer 1

I found a pretty easy solution. It was nothing more than getting all the required values from the DOM and putting them into an Array!

application.js:

$(".enable").click(function() {
    var table_row = $(this).closest("tr");
    var model_array = new Array;
    var elements_with_information = jRow.find("[name]");

    elements_with_information.each(function() {
            // Doing some checking on which kind of element 
            // it actually is and then basically doing:
            model_array.push($(this).text());
    });

    // Constructing nested array to use `params[:model]`
    var data = { "model" : {
        "property1": model_array[0],
        "property2": model_array[1]
    }};

    // Now doing the AJAX request
    $.ajax({
        url: "/model/doshit",
        type: "POST",
        data: data
    });
});