Posting a form through popup in Rails

Question

I have a model called Details, and two controller methods new and create. New method displays a form to create Details (in new.html.erb), which gets posted to the Create method that saves it. (when it succesffully saves, it it renders the new.html.erb file with the details.) This works as expected.

Now i want a separate page with a link to fill in these details. I want the click to do the intended work through a popup, example redbox. When you click on that link, a popup should show the form, whose submit should post the form, and if it is successfully done, then refresh the original page. If the post is unsaved, then the same form should show the errors. What do i need to do to make it work in Ror? I guess i need some stuff to go in new.js.rjs and maybe create.js.rjs, but i can't really figure out what to put in those files.

Answer 1

Redbox updates the page's dom to add a div at the end of it. So your form is a part of the main page.
So if you add a form tag in this redbox, all your page will be reloaded as there's only one.

So you add anywhere in your page (preferably at the end) :

<div id="redbox" style="display: none;">
    <%= form_for @details do %>
        # Whatever form fields you want here
    <% end -%>
</div>

You do a link that'll open the redbox :

<%= link_to_redbox 'Open The Details Form', 'redbox' %>

This will display your redbox with your form.
And as it is the same page, not a new windows, when you'll validate your form, it'll reload the all of it.

Answer 2

I used a link_to_remote_redbox for this, which on clicking, fetches the form rendered by the new method call in a popup widnow. it submits to the create function and it is now working. actually i had previously made it work without ajax and i was having difficulty in making it work with ajax. the problem was solved once i made separate partials for ajax calls, and doing: respond_to do |format| format.js { render :template => 'detail/ajax_template'} ... end

I provided different templates for both create and new method calls, used the :html => {:id => 'some-id'} in form and the :update => {:some-id} to replace the form with the message that it worked correctly.

So I didnt know that i needed separate templates for the different styles of forms, and that i needed to use the :update option to replace the form when i asked the above question.