Question

I have an HTML form in Rails:

<form id="my_form" action="submit">
  Title: <input type="text" name="title"> 
</form> 

I want to add a new field using a <textarea>:

Comment: <textarea rows="4" cols="50"></textarea>

Is it okay if put this into the form? How can I access the value that the user fills in?

Answer 1

Unless you have some good reason not to, you should really use the action view helpers provided by rails.

The form helpers provide resource-oriented methods which create a form and a scope around a specific model object, but this does not suit your case.

What you want instead is to use to use the generic form tag helpers, which include generic versions of the form methods not tied to any specific model or record, e.g.: form_tag, text_field_tag, text_area_tag, etc. These methods do not require you to pass a record to them or define them in terms of a specific model; you can define arbitrary actions, ids etc., like so:

<%= form_tag "submit", :id => "my_form" do -%>
  Title: <%= text_field_tag "title" %>
  Comment: <%= text_area_tag "comment", :rows => 4, :cols => 50 %>
  <%= submit_tag "Submit" %>
<% end -%>

Note that you had no name or id on your textarea, so I’ve arbitrarily assigned them the string "comment", which makes sense for the case.

In terms of accessing the value(s) the user enters, you just do it like any other form, i.e. in your controller you just access params[:title], params[:comment] etc.