Question

new to web development, here. I have a form like this:

<form name="myForm" id="myForm"  method="post" >

      <select id="id" name="foo">
        ...some stuff
      </select>

      <input type="submit"/>
</form>

The submit button calls the ‘index’ method of my controller, as expected. I would like to make it call some other function, such as ‘update’, how do I do that? I need to do something with the @_params hash, but I don’t want invoke the index function, to do it. Thanks.

Answer 1

You did not include the view logic so I am going to take a stab in the dark and guess you are writing the HTML for the form rather than using the RoR helpers.

In rails there are a set of helpers that help you generate forms and form items.

Please check the docs for form_for

Using form_for will follow the basic restful routing unless you modify the url parameter. So if you are on /new you will be routed to /create, if you are on /edit, you will be routed to /update. More precisely, if the object is new, you will submit to create, if the model exists you will submit to update.

If your form doesn’t use a model, you can use the form_tag helper that takes a url parameter and you can pass a string specifying what path to submit to.

If you just need to know how to do this in plain HTML, read this. Essentially, you need to include an action attribute on form that specifies the path to the action you want to post to.