Best practices for iterative development of views

Question

When your application has a view that is only accessible after submitting another form (think signup screen, a shopping cart checkout, or a wizard-like interface), what's the best way to work on the successive views without having to click through all the preceding steps?

Let's say we're working on the second or third step of a build-a-product wizard. Step one is pick a make and model, step 2 is picking options, step three is more customizations that are dependent on the choices made in steps 1 and 2. What's the fastest way to get to that view?

Do you build the html pages first, then convert them to erb? What do you do if it's an existing application and you're making modifications and don't have the original html to work with?

Answer 1

You can always refresh a page accessed via POST and resend it's datas so that you'd have once again the same one displayed.

You can also build yourself a temporary action that'll define some standard values and render the appropriate erb file.
Then you can access your page and update it without needing to fill all the previous steps first.