CFWheels - How to have a form self post?

Question

I'm new to wheels and still learning. It seems to me that every post of a form needs to call an action that maps to a method in the particular model. However, is it possible for a form to post to itself?

What I want to avoid is people navigating to an action view directly - which seems to throw an error. I'd also like to do a lot of self-posting because it might mean I won't have to have a lot of empty files laying around in my views folder.

Another advantage I was thinking about was the fact that if a form is self posting, I'd have the benefit of having it used globally. For example, I might have a form in my header that I want my user to fill out anywhere in the website. Or is there a way to detect where the user came from and do a dynamic redirectTo?

Many thanks, Michael.

Answer 1

To avoid errors due to users browsing to post actions, look at Verification: http://cfwheels.org/docs/chapter/verification

So your create and update actions would be configured like this in the controller's init:

<cffunction name="init">
    <cfset verifies(only="create,update", post=true, params="comment", paramsTypes="struct")>
</cffunction>

It is not unreasonable to redirect the user back to the previous page after the form has posted. Look at redirectTo(back=true) for your success action. http://cfwheels.org/docs/1-1/function/redirectto

<cffunction name="init">
    <cfscript>
        verifies(only="create,update", params="comment", paramsTypes="struct");
        provides("html,json");
    </cfscript>
</cffunction>

<cffunction name="create">
    <cfscript>
        comment = model("comment").new(params.comment);
        comment.save();

        if (isAjax())
        {
            renderWith(comment);
        }
        else
        {
            if (comment.hasErrors())
                redirectTo(back=true, error="There was an error saving the comment.");
            else
                redirectTo(back=true, success="The comment was posted successfully.");
        }
    </cfscript>
</cffunction>

Yes, I like Craig's answer that AJAX is a good solution, but you also need to consider what happens if the AJAX fails and the form is ultimately posted to the URL through a non-AJAX request. Best to provide a fully accessible experience.

Answer 2

Michael, you may want to consider making a form like that Ajaxy. In other words, you can have it submit the form data, using jQuery or similar, to a remote CFC method (i.e., a method whose access attribute is set to "remote"). That CFC could work its magic per usual and return the appropriate response that you act on in your view.

Here is a link to the Wheels docs "Wheels, Ajax and You". There's some nice stuff in that section and it might be what you're looking for here!

Answer 3

What little I know about Wheels is that it's an opinionated MVC framework inspired by Ruby on Rails. You are requesting help on avoiding the the Model-View-Controller pattern by having the form post to itself and bypass the controller. This should not be possible or at least discouraged in such a framework.

A good MVC framework should allow you to reuse your model, views and in some cases even controllers - globally.