Question

I’m writing an application that requires 3 inputs a day for every day of the year. (3*365=1095). I’m struggling with a way to output each field in an efficient manner.

The inputs are not all-or-nothing (you could fill in 10 days worth of input, hit save, and come back later to fill in more)

I attempted to do this by building all 1095 objects in the controller and then outputting the inputs in the view, but obviously this is really slow and probably memory intensive.

Any suggestions? I’m leaning toward writing the entire form client-side and then filling in the existing elements using AJAX.

EDIT

The model is called Timing and has these attributes:
month, day, time1, time2, time3
so there are 365 models to be saved.

Answer 1

@DVG’s answer probably works fine, but it keeps all of the work on the server.

What I ended up going with was my initial thought: get all of the existing timings like this:

def edit
  @timings = Timing.find_by_store_id(params[:store_id])
end

then in the view, I wrote two javascript functions: one that writes all 365 rows with all 3 columns. Once the field were all output in Javascript, I used another function that took the existing records and inserted them into the form:

<script type="text/javascript">
function updateForm(){
 timings = <%= @timings.to_json %>;
 ... fill out the fields ...
}
</script>

It works nice and fast, and best of all, no AJAX calls. Of course one caveat is that this fails if the user has Javascript disabled, but that’s not an issue for me.