Question

My app has a select box for users to choose a ‘venue’. This select box is, as you would expect, in a form. I also have an action somewhere on the page that creates a new venue via AJAX. After the new venue is created, I would like to updated the venue select box to reflect this.

My solution was to put the select box in a partial and render the partial from the create action in the controller.

 <div id='venue_select' style='clear: both;'>     <%= render :partial => 'venue/venue_select_box' %>  </div> 

The partial looks like this:

<%= f.collection_select :venue_id, @user_venues, :id, :name, :prompt => 'Select a venue' %> 

where f is the form reference:

<% form_for :shows do |f| %> 

The problem is that f is undefined in the partial, so I get an error. One solution would be to include the entire form, but I feel like that should not be necessary because I am not updating the entire form. Any ideas on how to go about this?

Answer 1

These are all great options but I think I found the easiest. Basically, I just hard coded the name in the collection_select so I would not need the ‘f’ variable:

<%= collection_select 'shows[venue_id]', :venue_id, @user_venues, :id, :name, { :prompt => 'Select one of your previous venues' } %> 

Then my VenueController is as follows:

class VenueController < ApplicationController   layout 'main'   before_filter :login_required, :get_user    def create     begin       venue = @user.venues.create(params[:venue])       @user_venues = @user.venues       render :partial => 'venue_select_box', :success => true, :status => :ok     rescue ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid => invalid       flash[:errors] = invalid.record.errors       render :text => '', :success => false, :status => :unprocessable_entity     end   end  end 

If this method is bad practice for any reason, please let me know and I will happily credit you for the answer.