Question

Ok, in PHP I can do this in 5 minutes. With Rails I am completely lost. I am so new to Rails and I have a requirement to do more advanced stuff with it then I am comfortable with currently. The Big guy decided lets go Rails from PHP. So its crash course learning. Fun times..

I understand from the javascript side making the post/get with jquery remains the same. On the ruby side however I am completely lost. What do I need to do in order to do a post/get to a Rails App. How would I define my controller? Lets say from the HTML side I am posting

input1 and input2 standard jquery $.post with a JSON request for data back. With php I would make a simple controller like:

public function myFormPostData(){
    $errors = "none";
    $errorMsg = "";
    if($_POST['input1'] == ""){$errors = "found"; $errorMsg .= "Input 1 Empty<br>";}
    if($_POST['input2'] == ""){$errors = "found"; $errorMsg .= "Input 2 Empty<br>";}

    if($errors == "found"){ $output = array("error" => "found", "msg" => $errorMsg); }
    else{
        $output = array("error" => "none", "msg" => "Form Posted OK!!"); 
    }
  echo json_encode($output);
}

but in ruby I dunno how to translate that concept. I’m open to suggestions and good practices. Grant it the above is a super mediocre rendition of what I am needing to do I would sanitize things more than that and all else, but it gives the idea of what I am looking for in Rails..

Answer 1

First of all, Rails 3 has a nice feature called respond_with. You might check out this Railscast episode that talks about it. http://railscasts.com/episodes/224-controllers-in-rails-3. The examples he uses are great if you are dealing with resources.

Having said that, I’ll give you an example with a more traditional approach. You need to have a controller action that handles requests which accept JSON responses.

class MyController < ApplicationController
  def foo
    # Do stuff here...
    respond_to do |format|
      if no_errors? # check for error condition here
        format.json { # This block will be called for JSON requests
          render :json => {:error => "none", :msg => "Form Posted OK"}
        }
      else
        format.json { # This block will be called for JSON requests
          render :json => {:error => "found", :msg => "My bad"}
        }
      end
    end
  end
end

Make sure that you have a route set up

post '/some/path' => "my#foo"

Those are the basics that you will need. Rails gives you a lot for free, so you may find that much of what you are looking for already exists.

If you post a more concrete example of what you are trying to you might get even better advice. Good luck!