Question

I’m currently working my way through various Rails tutorials, but all seem to recommend that a failed form submission should use a render to output the form with the errors. For example, the create method looks like this:

def create
  @user = User.new(params[:user])
  if @user.save
    flash[:success] = "Welcome to the Sample App"
    redirect_to @user
  else
    @title = "Sign up"
    render 'new'
  end
end

This has the desired effect, but means that if I have a new user form at http://localhost:3000/users/new and an error occurs, I get the same form with errors at http://localhost:3000/users

Is there a way to make sure I go to http://localhost:3000/users/new instead?

I thought about using a redirect instead of render ‘new’, but this would cause problems with displaying the form errors. Someone on the Rails IRC directed me to a way of doing clientside validations, but that seems like it dodges the issue.

Answer 1

I had a similar problem with my user signup form. Since I do not use RESTful routes there, I was able to solve it with the following routes:

resources :users, :except => [:new, :create] do
  ...
end
get  "/signup" => "users#new"
post "/signup" => "users#create"

and in the new form:

form_for @user, :url => signup_path do ...