Ruby on Rails registration data?

Question

Hi,

I am trying to build a registration page, with two steps.

The first step displays a form with name, email, pass.

The second step will display a ReCaptcha.

The problem is how do I store the form data and display a new form with a captcha?

I was thinking sessions, but I know you're not supposed to store sensitive information in sessions.

I was thinking of using Ajax to render the ReCaptcha if the name, email, pass.. pass validations.

Any advice? Thank you.

Answer 1

If you need something simple, you can retain the parameters in the second step using hidden fields.

If you need something more complicated (multiple steps, comming back to previous step, partial validations, etc) you may use a wizard plugin. Here is a list of wizard plugins from Ruby Toolbox.

Answer 2

My advice is that I think that two forms for a situation like this is unnecessarily complicated unless there is some application specific imperative to decouple the username/password capture and the CAPTCHA check.

You're probably right to be concerned about using the session to store the intermediate data but if you do want to go that way there's a great screencast showing the technique for a similar application here.

Personally I would go the Javascript route. Load both forms at the same time, step 1 being visible and and step 2 being hidden. Validate step 1 with an AJAX call to the server (if you need that) or client-side if you don't. If step 1 is valid then unhide the step 2 form (and optionally hide the step 1 form if you like).

UPDATE: Adding further info at questioner's request

There are lots of ways to hide and show page content but a common approach is to wrap it in a <div> block marked hidden using CSS and then use some Javascript (e.g. JQuery) to toggle it hidden or unhidden. Like this:

<div id="step2" style="display:none">
  <% form_for .... %>

  <% end %>
</div>

When the page is loaded for the first time the form will be hidden. Then in JQuery (for example) do:

$(function() {
  $('#step2').show();
});

to unhide it. See the documentation for show, hide and toggle for more usage examples.

Answer 3

There are lots of ways of doing this.

railscast #217, demostrates a generic way of dealing with multistep forms, capable of handling tricky things like going forwards and backwards multiple times. Give it a look.