Caution Thinking Out Aloud:
Okay the purists have just decided to kill me. Let the religious wars begin !
No seriously, everytime I do some coding in an old PHP app which is heavily dependent on HTML_QuickForm, I keep questioning how possible would it be to convert it across to Rails, and whether any other persons like myself would think all of their Christmases have come at once. Here’s my hopefully rational thought processes behind this. Rails is a fantastic CRUD machine. If you want to build single model forms with validations in them, absolutely beautiful. Nothing could feel more clean and make you as a developer go ‘thats sweet’. Fantastic.
Now try and do a model-less form, with validations, or combine multiple models within one form. Things like the presenter pattern get bandied about. Real world case example - a form to choose options for defining a report. Nothing that you want to put in a model as it’s not a represenation of a ‘thing’ (although some may argue it is).
I wonder and am sitting on the fence of, whether to try implementing quickform for rails. For those that haven’t been exposed to it, in a nutshell it’s a brilliant little php library that lets you create a representation of a form, with rules, pass the form into a renderer which dumps out the html on a page, but that’s not all, it assists you in processing the form on submission. So some code can look like this (not syntactically correct, but close enough), which does all of the hard work of writing out html, setting up client side js, and server side processing.
//page myform.php
$myform = new HtmlQuickForm('form_name', 'myform.php');
$abc = $myform->addElement('text', 'product_name', 'Product Name:');
$myform->addRule('product_name', 'required', 'You must enter a product name');
if ($myform->validate()) {
//process form
var_dump( $abc->getValue() );
} else {
//setup form
$abc->setValue('123')
}
// then in any template which dumps out the rails code
$myForm->display();It doesn’t seem like much, but put half a dozen or more options on the form, different processing rules, and suddenly it’s done a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
What would it take to add this to Rails ? How would (I personally) fit it in. It doesn’t really sit within either the model, view, or controller. The view should render the output, it doesn’t really fit within a model as it’s not a representation of a thing. It most closely sits in the controller, but you don’t really want to clutter the controller with your form models.
Here’s some thoughts
An initial idea, with everything defined in the controller, then dumped into the view by a @my_form.output
class FormController < Application
def do_form
get_form
if @myForm.posted
#do stuff
else
#populate stuff
end
end
protected
def create_report
@myform = RFormBuilder.new do |f|
f.call_back_url = { :controller => 'form', :action => 'do_form' }
f.name = 'myform'
end
@myform.add_text( :name => 'product_name', :label => 'Product Name',
:rule => { :required => :true, :msg => 'You must add this' } )
end
endOR
Maybe we add in a new folder in the main app
/app/
/controllers
/models
/views
/forms
myform.rb
And the treat myform.rb kinda like a model, but kinda not.
class MyForm < RFormBuilder
defaults :name => 'my_form', :call_back_url => '/myform'
text_field :name => 'product_name', :label => 'Product Name', :required => :true
#gets called when form is posted
def validate
return true if field_product_type == 'abc'
end
end
# now in FormController
def do_form
get_form
@my_form = MyForm.new
if @myForm.valid
#do stuff
render :text => @my_form.field_product_name
else
#populate stuff
end
endWhat do you think ? Am I stark raving mad. Could this just work ? I think so and am willing to take up the challenge…
Rowan
The open source Rails/Flex eCommerce application now has a name - XChain - pronounced cross-chain. I had some air travel time over the weekend and put it to good use coming up with a name, the basic premise being that the app should really be classified as a Supply Chain Management system as it deals with a lot more than simply taking peoples money for a product. (Order fulfillment, shipment tracking, eventually CRM and inventory management), and being a cross of two major technologies it seems to fit. Catchy enough and has meaning. Well I think so anyway, others might disagree - (that’s what the comments form at the bottom is for…), only downer is XChain.com is taken by some spammer, but I’ve snapped up .ca and other appropriate domains.
