Form submission and hyperlinks using GET and POST

Question

I have a search resource, the user can perform searches by filling out a form and submitting it, the create action is called, the Search is saved, the show action is called, and the results are displayed. This all happens with the default POST, and all works fine.

The user may want to save his search in the saved_search table (i don't use the Search table for this purpose as this table stores all searches for the purpose of compiling statistics, and gets cleared on a regular basis). Once the Search is saved, it can be re-run by clicking a hyperlink, this is where i start to get problems.

I see no way of getting my hyperlink to run the create action of Search, with a POST request, and the necessary data.

I then decided to try to get both form submission and the hyperlink to perform a search using a GET request, i was unable to get form_for to run my Search create action using a GET request, it always seems to get routed to my index action.

Can someone suggest a good restful solution to this problem please.

Many thanks

Answer 1

Jon, If I understood right, if the search is already saved, you could just make a get on the resource of the saved search like you did the first time and use the show action to display the result.

Anyway, if you still wants to do a post with a link, the helper method link_to does it for you. Check it out: http://www.51773.com/tools/api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/UrlHelper.html#M001597

With a :method => :post option it will create a hidden form and post your data.

Hope it helps.

Answer 2

I'm not quite sure what you're trying to do here. If you want to have a form submit with a GET request, you can override the HTML attribute on the form_for helper:

<% form_for blarg, :html => { :method => 'get' } %>
blabla
<% end %>

Rails also supports a way of "faking" the HTTP method by using a "magic" parameter (called "_method"), which makes Rails behave as if it had seen the HTTP method in that parameter.

If you send the form as "get", you must make sure that none such parameter is set. If you wanted to let a hyperlink send a "POST", tweaking this would be the way (a browser will not send a real POST on a click on a link)