Question

I’ve got a rails app that displays a list of items called modules. I’m iterating over these, rendering a partial for each one that includes a remote_form_for call.

This all works, but fails HTML validation because my form text fields all have the same id.

Is there a :prefix option on the form (or something else) I can use to get around this?

Update:
(some code)

    //_module_form.html.erb
    <% remote_form_for app_module do |f| %>
         <%= f.label :name %>
         <%= f.text_field :name %>
         <%= submit_tag 'Save' %>
    <%end %>

    //parent page
    <% @thing.modules.each do |app_module| %>
       <%= render :partial => "module_form", :locals => { :app_module => app_module } %>
    <% end %>

So if I have more than 1 item in the collection, I render the identical form on the same page, and the form id and textbox id are duplicated.

I can customize the form id pretty easily, but what about the text_box, since the controller is looking for specific named controls?

Answer 1

Add the :index => object.id to the options hash when creating your form. This should generate ids in the form of object_id_attribute without interfering with the controller.

Edit

The documentation regarding :index is is ambiguously misleading. :index does have an effect on the form submission. The solution is to specify the :id attribute for each field. This will change the id property, leaving name unharmed (which is what counts for the submission).

Here is the code I use in a generic helper for generating these fields:

def create_field( f, field_type, object, field_name )
    field_id = "#{object.class.name.downcase}_#{object.id.to_s}_#{field_name.to_s}"
    f.send( field_type, field_name, :id => field_id )
end