Ruby on Rails using tabs

Question

everyone!

At first, I made a single form with large amount of elements: text fields, text areas and so on. When I had got the form ready, I understood that it is not so user-friendly to have such a large form to be filled-in in a row. I don't want to use the "step" system (step 1 -> step 2 -> ... -> step n), because I want for the end-user to be able to have this form filled in any order (+ User would be able to see beforehead what forms he would need to fill), so I divided the form into the several tabs.

The idea is following: once user has filled the form in some tab, he hits the "Save" button and proceeds to the next one (in arbitrary order of his choice).

The thing I wanted to know - what would be the best approach to store the intermediate data ? Should I have some hidden input for each of the tab forms with tab-id to be passed to the model, so that at each 'step' only tab relevant data was validated and stored in DB. Or, maybe, I should have a session[:object] that would contain the current object and at the very end I would store it in DB and erase from the session.

Can this idea be realised ?

Thanks in advance! :)

Answer 1

there's a gem called wicked, it allows you create wizards in a very simple way, check it out

Answer 2

I'm not a ruby ninja, but in other languages (like php) we usually use sessions to do this. Why not to do this on rails?

Also you can consider creating a table for "temporary storage rows" in addition of using sessions, so every time you change the page you could save the data to that table and, at the end, save them all to your main tables.

This is useful if you usually loose your session... you can related the temporary storage rows with the user and if he looses the session, you can restore his uncompleted forms from your database.

Answer 3

You could simply go the Railscasts 217 - Multistep form approach, which works fine.

However, this may not suit you as you may only store the data AFTER you have everything collected, and not step by step.

Another solution - as you mentioned - would be using e.g. jQuery tabs to create your form steps and building a little validation via AJAX / backbone.js before storing the actual record with all its data.