Question

So I’m building a rails app for high school students and I’ve hit a problem when it comes to creating users.

I want the students to only be able to create accounts if they select their school and type in their school’s password correctly.

What is the correct / easiest way of doing this? Should I create a gatekeeper to the user#new action that they have to pass first or if their a way that on the same page a student can submit to forms. One would be the regular username, email, password using:

form_for @user do
  ...
end

But then creating another form for the high-school / high-school password selection.

Ideally the controller would be able to get the params of the high-school form, validate those, then go on to create the user from the user params.

Is this possible using rails?

My setup: Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9.2dev

Thank you!

Answer 1

You can do this with fields_for (http://apidock.com/rails/ActionView/Helpers/FormHelper/fields_for)

Your view will look something like

form_for @user do |f|
  fields_for @school do |school|
    school.text_field     :name
    school.password_field :password
  end

  f.text_field     :username
  f.text_field     :email
  f.password_field :password
  f.submit "Submit"
end

Then in your controller, params[:user] will represent the user data, and params[:school] will represent the school name/password.

You can then validate the correct school password before creating the user.