Question

I’m using the technique Ryan Bates illustrated in Railscasts Episode 197 so that the form can “grow” as the user adds more items to the form. That’s all working great, but I need to call the page while supplying an initial item as a part of the URL.

Since Ryan’s technique has the user click an Add button to invoke a jQuery function to add fields to the form, I’m a little stymied how to pass information from the controller to jQuery to invoke — and prefill — one of those new fields.

Am I thinking about this wrong?

Answer 1

Yes, you’re thinking about it wrong 😉

Take this form for example:

<% form_for @survey do |f| %>  
  <%= f.error_messages %>  
  <p>  
    <%= f.label :name %><br />  
    <%= f.text_field :name %>  
  </p>  
  <% f.fields_for :questions do |builder| %>  
    <%= render 'question_fields', :f => builder %>  
  <% end %>  
  <p><%= link_to_add_fields "Add Question", f, :questions %>  
  <p><%= f.submit "Submit" %></p>  
<% end %>

fields_for is an iterator; so all your controller has to do is:

@survey.questions.build(:content => "Prepared question")

and it will show up on the page.