This guide covers getting up and running with Ruby on Rails. After reading it,
you should be familiar with:
- Installing Rails, creating a new Rails application, and connecting your application to a database
- The general layout of a Rails application
- The basic principles of MVC (Model, View Controller) and RESTful design
- How to quickly generate the starting pieces of a Rails application
endprologue.
WARNING. This Guide is based on Rails 3.2. Some of the code shown here will not
work in earlier versions of Rails.
WARNING: The Edge version of this guide is currently being re-worked. Please excuse us while we re-arrange the place.
This guide is designed for beginners who want to get started with a Rails
application from scratch. It does not assume that you have any prior experience
with Rails. However, to get the most out of it, you need to have some
prerequisites installed:
- The Ruby language version 1.8.7 or higher
TIP: Note that Ruby 1.8.7 p248 and p249 have marshaling bugs that crash Rails
3.0. Ruby Enterprise Edition have these fixed since release 1.8.7-2010.02
though. On the 1.9 front, Ruby 1.9.1 is not usable because it outright segfaults
on Rails 3.0, so if you want to use Rails 3 with 1.9.x jump on 1.9.2 or
1.9.3 for smooth sailing.
- The RubyGems packaging system
- If you want to learn more about RubyGems, please read the RubyGems User Guide
- A working installation of the SQLite3 Database
Rails is a web application framework running on the Ruby programming language.
If you have no prior experience with Ruby, you will find a very steep learning
curve diving straight into Rails. There are some good free resources on the
internet for learning Ruby, including:
Rails is a web application development framework written in the Ruby language.
It is designed to make programming web applications easier by making assumptions
about what every developer needs to get started. It allows you to write less
code while accomplishing more than many other languages and frameworks.
Experienced Rails developers also report that it makes web application
development more fun.
Rails is opinionated software. It makes the assumption that there is a “best”
way to do things, and it’s designed to encourage that way – and in some cases to
discourage alternatives. If you learn “The Rails Way” you’ll probably discover a
tremendous increase in productivity. If you persist in bringing old habits from
other languages to your Rails development, and trying to use patterns you
learned elsewhere, you may have a less happy experience.
The Rails philosophy includes two major guiding principles:
- DRY – “Don’t Repeat Yourself” – suggests that writing the same code over and over again is a bad thing.
- Convention Over Configuration – means that Rails makes assumptions about what you want to do and how you’re going to
do it, rather than requiring you to specify every little thing through endless configuration files.
The best way to use this guide is to follow each step as it happens, no code or
step needed to make this example application has been left out, so you can
literally follow along step by step. You can get the complete code
here.
By following along with this guide, you’ll create a Rails project called blog, a
(very) simple weblog. Before you can start building the application, you need to
make sure that you have Rails itself installed.
TIP: The examples below use # and $ to denote terminal prompts. If you are using Windows, your prompt will look something like c:\source_code>
To install Rails, use the gem install command provided by RubyGems:
- gem install rails
TIP. If you’re working on Windows, you can quickly install Ruby and Rails with Rails Installer.
To verify that you have everything installed correctly, you should be able to run the following:
$ rails —version
If it says something like “Rails 3.2.3” you are ready to continue.
Rails comes with a number of generators that are designed to make your development life easier. One of these is the new application generator, which will provide you with the foundation of a Rails application so that you don’t have to write it yourself.
To use this generator, open a terminal, navigate to a directory where you have rights to create files, and type:
$ rails new blog
This will create a Rails application called Blog in a directory called blog.
TIP: You can see all of the command line options that the Rails application builder accepts by running rails new -h.
After you create the blog application, switch to its folder to continue work directly in that application:
$ cd blog
The rails new blog command we ran above created a folder in your working directory called blog. The blog directory has a number of auto-generated files and folders that make up the structure of a Rails application. Most of the work in this tutorial will happen in the app/ folder, but here’s a basic rundown on the function of each of the files and folders that Rails created by default:
| File/Folder | Purpose |
|---|---|
| app/ | Contains the controllers, models, views, helpers, mailers and assets for your application. You’ll focus on this folder for the remainder of this guide. |
| config/ | Configure your application’s runtime rules, routes, database, and more. This is covered in more detail in Configuring Rails Applications |
| config.ru | Rack configuration for Rack based servers used to start the application. |
| db/ | Contains your current database schema, as well as the database migrations. |
| doc/ | In-depth documentation for your application. |
| Gemfile Gemfile.lock |
These files allow you to specify what gem dependencies are needed for your Rails application. These files are used by the Bundler gem. For more information about Bundler, see the Bundler website |
| lib/ | Extended modules for your application. |
| log/ | Application log files. |
| public/ | The only folder seen to the world as-is. Contains the static files and compiled assets. |
| Rakefile | This file locates and loads tasks that can be run from the command line. The task definitions are defined throughout the components of Rails. Rather than changing Rakefile, you should add your own tasks by adding files to the lib/tasks directory of your application. |
| README.rdoc | This is a brief instruction manual for your application. You should edit this file to tell others what your application does, how to set it up, and so on. |
| script/ | Contains the rails script that starts your app and can contain other scripts you use to deploy or run your application. |
| test/ | Unit tests, fixtures, and other test apparatus. These are covered in Testing Rails Applications |
| tmp/ | Temporary files |
| vendor/ | A place for all third-party code. In a typical Rails application, this includes Ruby Gems and the Rails source code (if you optionally install it into your project). |
To begin with, let’s get some text up on screen quickly. To do this, you need to get your Rails application server running.
You actually have a functional Rails application already. To see it, you need to start a web server on your development machine. You can do this by running:
$ rails server
TIP: Compiling CoffeeScript to JavaScript requires a JavaScript runtime and the absence of a runtime will give you an execjs error. Usually Mac OS X and Windows come with a JavaScript runtime installed. Rails adds the therubyracer gem to Gemfile in a commented line for new apps and you can uncomment if you need it. therubyrhino is the recommended runtime for JRuby users and is added by default to Gemfile in apps generated under JRuby. You can investigate about all the supported runtimes at ExecJS.
This will fire up WEBrick, a webserver built into Ruby by default. To see your application in action, open a browser window and navigate to http://localhost:3000. You should see the Rails default information page:
TIP: To stop the web server, hit Ctrl+C in the terminal window where it’s running. In development mode, Rails does not generally require you to restart the server; changes you make in files will be automatically picked up by the server.
The “Welcome Aboard” page is the smoke test for a new Rails application: it makes sure that you have your software configured correctly enough to serve a page. You can also click on the About your application’s environment link to see a summary of your application’s environment.
To get Rails saying “Hello”, you need to create at minimum a controller and a view.
A controller’s purpose is to receive specific requests for the application. Routing decides which controller receives which requests. Often, there is more than one route to each controller, and different routes can be served by different actions. Each action’s purpose is to collect information to provide it to a view.
A view’s purpose is to display this information in a human readable format. An important distinction to make is that it is the controller, not the view, where information is collected. The view should just display that information. By default, view templates are written in a language called ERB (Embedded Ruby) which is converted by the request cycle in Rails before being sent to the user.
To create a new controller, you will need to run the “controller” generator and tell it you want a controller called “welcome” with an action called “index”, just like this:
$ rails generate controller welcome index
Rails will create several files for you. Most important of these are of course the controller, located at app/controllers/welcome_controller.rb and the view, located at app/views/welcome/index.html.erb.
Open the app/views/welcome/index.html.erb file in your text editor and edit it to contain a single line of code:
<h1>Hello, Rails!</h1>
Now that we have made the controller and view, we need to tell Rails when we want “Hello Rails!” to show up. In our case, we want it to show up when we navigate to the root URL of our site, http://localhost:3000. At the moment, however, the “Welcome Aboard” smoke test is occupying that spot.
To fix this, delete the index.html file located inside the public directory of the application.
You need to do this because Rails will serve any static file in the public directory that matches a route in preference to any dynamic content you generate from the controllers.
Next, you have to tell Rails where your actual home page is located.
Open the file config/routes.rb in your editor. This is your application’s routing file which holds entries in a special DSL (domain-specific language) that tells Rails how to connect incoming requests to controllers and actions. This file contains many sample routes on commented lines, and one of them actually shows you how to connect the root of your site to a specific controller and action. Find the line beginning with root :to and uncomment it. It should look something like the following:
Blog::Application.routes.draw do
#…- You can have the root of your site routed with “root”
- just remember to delete public/index.html.
root :to => “welcome#index”
The root :to => “welcome#index” tells Rails to map requests to the root of the application to the welcome controller’s index action. This was created earlier when you ran the controller generator (rails generate controller welcome index).
If you navigate to http://localhost:3000 in your browser, you’ll see Hello, Rails!.
NOTE. For more information about routing, refer to Rails Routing from the Outside In.
Now that you’ve seen how to create a controller, an action and a view, let’s create something with a bit more substance.
In the Blog application, you will now create a new resource. A resource is the term used for a collection of similar objects, such as posts, people or animals. You can create, read, update and destroy items for a resource and these operations are referred to as CRUD operations.
In the next section, you will add the ability to create new posts in your application and be able to view them. This is the “CR” from CRUD. The form for doing this will look like this:
It will look a little basic for now, but that’s ok. We’ll look at improving the styling for it afterwards.
The first thing that you are going to need to create a new post within the application is a place to do that. A great place for that would be at /posts/new. If you attempt to navigate to that now — by visiting http://localhost:3000/posts/new — Rails will give you a routing error:
This is because there is nowhere inside the routes for the application — defined inside config/routes.rb — that defines this route. By default, Rails has no routes configured at all, and so you must define your routes as you need them.
To do this, you’re going to need to create a route inside config/routes.rb file, on a new line between the do and the end for the draw method:get “posts/new”
This route is a super-simple route: it defines a new route that only responds to GET requests, and that the route is at posts/new. But how does it know where to go without the use of the :to option? Well, Rails uses a sensible default here: Rails will assume that you want this route to go to the new action inside the posts controller.
With the route defined, requests can now be made to /posts/new in the application. Navigate to http://localhost:3000/posts/new and you’ll see another routing error:
This error is happening because this route need a controller to be defined. The route is attempting to find that controller so it can serve the request, but with the controller undefined, it just can’t do that. The solution to this particular problem is simple: you need to create a controller called PostsController. You can do this by running this command:
$ rails g controller posts
If you open up the newly generated app/controllers/posts_controller.rb you’ll see a fairly empty controller:
class PostsController < ApplicationController
end
A controller is simply a class that is defined to inherit from ApplicationController. It’s inside this class that you’ll define methods that will become the actions for this controller. These actions will perform CRUD operations on the posts within our system.
If you refresh http://localhost:3000/posts/new now, you’ll get a new error:
This error indicates that Rails cannot find the new action inside the PostsController that you just generated. This is because when controllers are generated in Rails they are empty by default, unless you tell it you wanted actions during the generation process.
To manually define an action inside a controller, all you need to do is to define a new method inside the controller. Open app/controllers/posts_controller.rb and inside the PostsController class, define a new method like this:
def new
end
With the new method defined in PostsController, if you refresh http://localhost:3000/posts/new you’ll see another error:
You’re getting this error now because Rails expects plain actions like this one to have views associated with them to display their information. With no view available, Rails errors out.
In the above image, the bottom line has been truncated. Let’s see what the full thing looks like:
Missing template posts/new, application/new with {:locale=>[:en], :formats=>[:html], :handlers=>[:erb, :builder, :coffee]}. Searched in: * “/path/to/blog/app/views”
That’s quite a lot of text! Let’s quickly go through and understand what each part of it does.
The first part identifies what template is missing. In this case, it’s the posts/new template. Rails will first look for this template. If not found, then it will attempt to load a template called application/new. It looks for one here because the PostsController inherits from ApplicationController.
The next part of the message contains a hash. The :locale key in this hash simply indicates what spoken language template should be retrieved. By default, this is the English — or “en” — template. The next key, :formats specifies the format of template to be served in response . The default format is :html, and so Rails is looking for an HTML template. The final key, :handlers, is telling us what template handlers could be used to render our template. :erb is most commonly used for HTML templates, :builder is used for XML templates, and :coffee uses CoffeeScript to build JavaScript templates.
The final part of this message tells us where Rails has looked for the templates. Templates within a basic Rails application like this are kept in a single location, but in more complex applications it could be many different paths.
The simplest template that would work in this case would be one located at app/views/posts/new.html.erb. The extension of this file name is key: the first extension is the format of the template, and the second extension is the handler that will be used. Rails is attempting to find a template called posts/new within app/views for the application. The format for this template can only be html and the handler must be one of erb, builder or coffee. Because you want to create a new HTML form, you will be using the ERB language. Therefore the file should be called posts/new.html.erb and needs to be located inside the app/views directory of the application.
Go ahead now and create a new file at app/views/posts/new.html.erb and write this content in it:
When you refresh http://localhost:3000/posts/new you’ll now see that the page has a title. The route, controller, action and view are now working harmoniously! It’s time to create the form for a new post.
To create a form within this template, you will use a form
builder. The primary form builder for Rails is provided by a helper
method called form_for. To use this method, add this code into app/views/posts/new.html.erb:
<%= form_for :post do |f| >
<= f.label :title >
<= f.text_field :title %>
<%= f.label :text %>
<%= f.text_area :text %>
<%= f.submit %>
<% end %>
If you refresh the page now, you’ll see the exact same form as in the example. Building forms in Rails is really just that easy!
When you call form_for, you pass it an identifying object for this form. In this case, it’s the symbol :post. This tells the form_for helper what this form is for. Inside the block for this method, the FormBuilder object — represented by f — is used to build two labels and two text fields, one each for the title and text of a post. Finally, a call to submit on the f object will create a submit button for the form.
There’s one problem with this form though. If you inspect the HTML that is generated, by viewing the source of the page, you will see that the action attribute for the form is pointing at /posts/new. This is a problem because this route goes to the very page that you’re on right at the moment, and that route should only be used to display the form for a new post.
So the form needs to use a different URL in order to go somewhere else. This can be done quite simply with the :url option of form_for. Typically in Rails, the action that is used for new form submissions like this is called “create”, and so the form should be pointed to this action.
Edit the form_for line inside app/views/posts/new.html.erb to look like this:
<%= form_for :post, :url => { :action => :create } do |f| %>
In this example, a Hash object is passed to the :url option. What Rails will do with this is that it will point the form to the create action of the current controller, the PostsController, and will send a POST request to that route. For this to work, you will need to add a route to config/routes.rb, right underneath the one for “posts/new”:
post “posts/create”
By using the post method rather than the get method, Rails will define a route that will only respond to POST methods. The POST method is the typical method used by forms all over the web.
With the form and the route for it defined now, you will be able to fill in the form and then click the submit button to begin the process of creating a new post, so go ahead and do that. When you submit the form, you should see a familiar error:
You will now need to create the create action within the PostsController for this to work.
To make the “Unknown action” go away, you can define a create action within the PostsController class in app/controllers/posts_controller.rb, underneath the new action:
class PostsController < ApplicationController
def new
end
end
If you re-submit the form now, you’ll see another familiar error: a template is missing. That’s ok, we can ignore that for now. What the create action should be doing is saving our new post to a database.
When a form is submitted, the fields of the form are sent to Rails as parameters. These parameters can then be referenced inside the controller actions, typically to perform a particular task. To see what these parameters look like, change the create action to this:
def create
render :text => params[:post].inspect
end
The render method here is taking a very simple hash with the key of text and the value of params[:post].inspect. The params method here is the object which represents the parameters (or fields) coming in from the form. The params method returns a HashWithIndifferentAccess object, which allows you to access the keys of the hash using either strings or symbols. In this situation, the only parameters that matter are the ones from the form.
If you re-submit the form one more time you’ll now no longer get the missing template error. Instead, you’ll see something that looks like the following:
{"title"=>"First post!", “text”=>"This is my first post."}
This action is now displaying the parameters for the post that are coming in from the form. However, this isn’t really all that helpful. Yes, you can see the parameters but nothing in particular is being done with them.
Rails uses models to manage database objects, so if you want to save
data to the database you’ll have to create a model. In our blog
application you want to save posts, so you’ll create a Post model.
You can create a model with the following command:
$ rails generate model Post title:string text:text
With that command we told Rails that we want a Post model, which in
turn should have a title attribute of type string, and a text attribute
of type text. Rails in turn responded by creating a bunch of files. For
now, we’re only interested in app/models/post.rb and
db/migrate/20120419084633_create_posts.rb. The latter is responsible
for creating the database structure, which is what we’ll look at next.
As we’ve just seen, rails generate model created a database
migration file inside the db/migrate directory.
Migrations are Ruby classes that are designed to make it simple to
create and modify database tables. Rails uses rake commands to run migrations,
and it’s possible to undo a migration after it’s been applied to your database.
Migration filenames include a timestamp to ensure that they’re processed in the
order that they were created.
If you look in the db/migrate/20120419084633_create_posts.rb file (remember,
yours will have a slightly different name), here’s what you’ll find:
class CreatePosts < ActiveRecord::Migration
def change
create_table :posts do |t|
t.string :title
t.text :text
end
The above migration creates a method named change which will be called when you
run this migration. The action defined in this method is also reversible, which
means Rails knows how to reverse the change made by this migration, in case you
want to reverse it later. When you run this migration it will create a
posts table with one string column and a text column. It also creates two
timestamp fields to allow Rails to track post creation and update times. More
information about Rails migrations can be found in the Rails Database
Migrations guide.
At this point, you can use a rake command to run the migration:
$ rake db:migrate
Rails will execute this migration command and tell you it created the Posts
table.
== CreatePosts: migrating ============
— create_table(:posts)
→ 0.0019s
== CreatePosts: migrated (0.0020s) ===========
NOTE. Because you’re working in the development environment by default, this
command will apply to the database defined in the development section of your
config/database.yml file. If you would like to execute migrations in another
environment, for instance in production, you must explicitly pass it when
invoking the command: rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production.
Back in posts_controller, we need to change the create action
to use the new Post model to save data in the database. Open that file
and change the create action to look like the following:
def create
@post = Post.new(params[:post])
end
Here’s what’s going on: every Rails model can be initialized with its
respective attributes, which are automatically mapped to its
database columns. In the first line we do just that (remember that
params[:post] contains the attributes we’re interested in). Then,
@post.save is responsible for saving the model in the database.
Finally, on the last line we redirect the user to the show action,
wich we have not defined yet.
TIP: As we’ll see later, @post.save returns a boolean indicating
wherever the model was saved or not, and you can (and usually do) take
different actions depending on the result of calling @post.save.
Before trying to create a new post, let’s add the show action, which
will be responsible for showing our posts. Open config/routes.rb
and add the following route:
get “posts/:id” => “posts#show”
The special syntax :id tells rails that this route expects an :id
parameter, which in our case will be the id of the post. Note that this
time we had to specify the actual mapping, posts#show because
otherwise Rails would not know which action to render.
As we did before, we need to add the show action in the
posts_controller and its respective view.
def show
@post = Post.find(params[:id])
end
A couple of things to note. We use Post.find to find the post we’re
interested in. We also use an instance variable (prefixed by @) to
hold a reference to the post object. We do this because Rails will pass all instance
variables to the view.
Now, create a new file app/view/posts/show.html.erb with the following
content:
Title: <%= @post.title %>
Text: <%= @post.text %>
Finally, if you now go to
http://localhost:3000/posts/new you’ll
be able to create a post. Try it!
We still need a way to list all our posts, so let’s do that. As usual,
we’ll need a route, a controller action, and a view:
- Add to config/routes.rb
get “posts” => “posts#index”
- Add to app/controllers/posts_controller.rb
def index
@posts = Post.all
end
app/view/posts/index.html.erb:
<% @posts.each do |post| >
<% end %>
| Title | Text |
|---|---|
| <= post.title > | <= post.text %> |
You can now create, show, and list posts. Now let’s add some links to
navigate through pages.
Open app/views/welcome/index.html.erb and modify it as follows:
<%= link_to “My Blog”, :controller => “posts” %>
The link_to method is one of Rails’ built-in view helpers. It creates a
hyperlink based on text to display and where to go – in this case, to the path
for posts.
Let’s add links to the other views as well.
- app/views/posts/index.html.erb
<%= link_to ‘New post’, :action => :new %>
<% @posts.each do |post| >
<% end %>
| Title | Text | |
|---|---|---|
| <= post.title > | <= post.text > | <= link_to ‘Show’, :action => :show, :id => post.id %> |
- app/views/posts/new.html.erb
<%= form_for :post do |f| >
…
< end %>
<%= link_to ‘Back’, :action => :index %>
- app/views/posts/show.html.erb
Title: <%= @post.title %>
Text: <%= @post.text %>
<%= link_to ‘Back’, :action => :index %>
TIP: If you want to link to an action in the same controller, you don’t
need to specify the :controller option, as Rails will use the current
controller by default.
TIP: In development mode (which is what you’re working in by default), Rails
reloads your application with every browser request, so there’s no need to stop
and restart the web server when a change is made.
The model file, app/models/post.rb is about as simple as it can get:
class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
end
There isn’t much to this file – but note that the Post class inherits from
ActiveRecord::Base. Active Record supplies a great deal of functionality to
your Rails models for free, including basic database CRUD (Create, Read, Update,
Destroy) operations, data validation, as well as sophisticated search support
and the ability to relate multiple models to one another.
Rails includes methods to help you validate the data that you send to models.
Open the app/models/post.rb file and edit it:
class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
validates :title, :presence => true,
:length => { :minimum => 5 }
end
These changes will ensure that all posts have a title that is at least five characters long.
Rails can validate a variety of conditions in a model, including the presence or uniqueness of columns, their
format, and the existence of associated objects. Validations are covered in detail
in Active Record Validations and
Callbacks
If you open posts_controller again, you’ll notice that we don’t check
the result of calling @post.save. We need to change its behavior to
show the form back to the user if any error occur:
def new
@post = Post.new
end
def create
@post = Post.new(params[:post])
end
Notice that I’ve also added @post = Post.new to the new action. I’ll
explain why I did that in the next section, for now add that to your
controller as well.
Also notice that we use render instead of redirect_to when save
returns false. We can use render so that the @post object is passed
back to the view.
If you reload
http://localhost:3000/posts/new and
try to save a post without a title, Rails will send you back to the
form, but that’s not very useful. You need to tell the user that
something went wrong. To do that, you’ll modify
app/views/posts/index.html.erb to check for error messages:
<%= form_for :post, :url => { :action => :create } do |f| >
< if post.errors.any? %>
<div id="errorExplanation">
<h2><%= pluralize(post.errors.count, “error”) > prohibited
this post from being saved:
- <= msg >
< @post.errors.full_messages.each do |msg| >
< end %>
<%= f.label :title %>
<%= f.text_field :title %>
<%= f.label :text %>
<%= f.text_area :text %>
<%= f.submit %>
<% end %>
<%= link_to ‘Back’, :action => :index %>
A few things are going on. We check if there are any errors with
@post.errors.any?, and in that case we show a list of all
errors with @post.errors.full_messages.
pluralize is a rails helper
that takes a number and a string as its arguments. If the number is
greater than one, the string will be automatically pluralized.
The reason why we added @post = Post.new in posts_controller is that
otherwise @post would be nil in our view, and calling
@post.errors.any? would throw an error.
TIP: Rails automatically wraps fields that contain an error with a div
with class field_with_errors. You can define a css rule to make them
standout.
Now you’ll get a nice error message when saving a post without title:
We’ve covered the “CR” part of CRUD. Now let’s focus on the “U” part,
updating posts.
The first step we’ll take is adding a edit action to
posts_controller.
Start by adding a route to config/routes.rb:
get “posts/:id/edit” => “posts#edit”
And then add the controller action:
def edit
@post = Post.find(params[:id])
end
The view will contain a form similar to the one we used when creating
new posts. Create a file called app/views/posts/edit.html.erb and make
it look as follows:
<%= form_for :post, :url => { :action => :update, :id => post.id },
:method => :put do |f| %>
<% if @post.errors.any? %>
<div id="errorExplanation">
<h2><%= pluralize(post.errors.count, “error”) > prohibited
this post from being saved:
- <= msg >
< @post.errors.full_messages.each do |msg| >
< end %>
<%= f.label :title %>
<%= f.text_field :title %>
<%= f.label :text %>
<%= f.text_area :text %>
<%= f.submit %>
<% end %>
<%= link_to ‘Back’, :action => :index %>
This time we point the form to the update action (not defined yet).
The :method => :put option tells Rails that we want this form to be
submitted via put, which is the http method you’re expected to use to
update resources according to the REST protocol.
TIP: By default forms built with the form_for_ helper are sent via +POST.
Moving on, we need to add the update action. The file
config/routes.rb will need just one more line:
put “posts/:id” => “posts#update”
And the update action in posts_controller itself should not look too complicated by now:
def update
@post = Post.find(params[:id])
end
The new method update_attributes is used when you want to update a record
that already exists, and it accepts an hash containing the attributes
that you want to update. As before, if there was an error updating the
post we want to show the form back to the user.
TIP: you don’t need to pass all attributes to update_attributes. For
example, if you’d call @post.update_attributes(:title => ‘A new title’)
Rails would only update the title attribute, leaving all other
attributes untouched.
Finally, we want to show a link to the edit action in the index and
show views:
- app/view/posts/index.html.erb
<% @posts.each do |post| >
<% end %>
| Title | Text | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| <= post.title > | <= post.text > | <= link_to ‘Show’, :action => :show, :id => post.id > | <= link_to ‘Edit’, :action => :edit, :id => post.id %> |
- app/view/posts/show.html.erb
…
<%= link_to ‘Back’, :action => :index >
| <= link_to ‘Edit’, :action => :edit, :id => @post.id %>
And here’s how our app looks so far:
partials are what Rails uses to remove duplication in views. Here’s a
simple example:
- app/views/user/show.html.erb
<%= render ‘user_details’ %>
- app/views/user/_user_details.html.erb
<%= @user.location %>
<%= @user.about_me %>
The show view will automatically include the content of the
_user_details view. Note that partials are prefixed by an underscore,
as to not be confused with regular views. However, you don’t include the
underscore when including them with the helper method.
TIP: You can read more about partials in the Layouts and Rendering in
Rails guide.
Our edit action looks very similar to the new action, in fact they
both share the same code for displaying the form. Lets clean them up by
using a _form partial.
Create a new file app/views/posts/_form.html.erb with the following
content:
<%= form_for post do |f| %>
<% if @post.errors.any? %>
<div id="errorExplanation">
<h2><%= pluralize(post.errors.count, “error”) > prohibited
this post from being saved:
- <= msg >
< @post.errors.full_messages.each do |msg| >
< end %>
<%= f.label :title %>
<%= f.text_field :title %>
<%= f.label :text %>
<%= f.text_area :text %>
<%= f.submit %>
<% end %>
Everything except for the form_for declaration remained the same. I’ll
explain later how form_for can figure out the right action and
method attributes when building the form, for now let’s update the
new and edit views:
- app/views/posts/new.html.erb
<%= render ‘form’ %>
<%= link_to ‘Back’, :action => :index %>
- app/views/posts/edit.html.erb
<%= render ‘form’ %>
<%= link_to ‘Back’, :action => :index %>
Point your browser to
http://localhost:3000/posts/new and
try creating a new post. Everything still works. Now try editing the
post and you’ll receive the following error:
To understand this error, you need to understand how form_for works.
When you pass an object to form_for and you don’t specify a :url
option, Rails will try to guess the action and method options by
checking if the passed object is a new record or not. Rails follows the
REST convention, so to create a new Post object it will look for a
route named posts_path, and to update a Post object it will look for
a route named post_path and pass the current object. Similarly, rails
knows that it should create new objects via POST and update them via
PUT.
If you run rake routes from the console you’ll see that we already
have a posts_path route, which was created automatically by Rails.
However, we don’t have a post_path yet, which is the reason why we
received an error before.
- rake routes
posts_create POST /posts/create(.:format) posts#create
GET /posts/:id(.:format) posts#show
GET /posts/:id/edit(.:format) posts#edit
PUT /posts/:id(.:format) posts#update
root / welcome#index
To fix this, open config/routes.rb and modify the get “posts/:id”
line like this:
get “posts/:id” => “posts#show”, :as => :post
Now you’ll be able to update posts again.
We’re now ready to cover the “D” part of CRUD, deleting posts from the
database. Following the REST convention, we’re going to add a route for
deleting posts:
- config/routes.rb
delete “posts/:id” => “posts#destroy”
We use the delete method for destroying resources, which is mapped to
the destroy action, which is provided below:
- app/controllers/posts_controller.rb
def destroy
@post = Post.find(params[:id])
@post.destroy
end
You can call destroy on Active Record objects when you want to delete
them from the dabase. Note that we don’t need to add a view for this
action since we’re redirecting to the index action.
Finally, add a ‘destroy’ link to your index action to wrap everything
together.
<% @posts.each do |post| >
<% end %>
| Title | Text | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| <= post.title > | <= post.text > | <= link_to ‘Show’, :action => :show, :id => post.id > | <= link_to ‘Edit’, :action => :edit, :id => post.id > | <= link_to ‘Destroy’, { :action => :destroy, :id => post.id }, :method => :delete, :confirm => ‘Are you sure?’ %> |
Here we’re using link_to in a different way. We wrap the
:action and :id attributes in a hash so that we can pass other
arguments to link_to. The :method and :confirm
options are used as html5 attributes so that when the click is linked,
Rails will first show a confirm dialog to the user, and then submit the
link with method delete. This is done via javascript automatically.
Congratulations, you can now create, show, list, update and destroy
posts. In the next section will see how Rails can aid us when creating
REST applications, and how we can refactor our Blog app to take
advantage of it.
To see your validations in action, you can use the console. The console is a
command-line tool that lets you execute Ruby code in the context of your
application:
$ rails console
TIP: The default console will make changes to your database. You can instead
open a console that will roll back any changes you make by using rails console
—sandbox.
After the console loads, you can use it to work with your application’s models:
>> p = Post.new(:content => “A new post”)
=> #<Post id: nil, name: nil, title: nil,
content: “A new post”, created_at: nil,
updated_at: nil>
>> p.save
=> false
>> p.errors.full_messages
=> [“Name can’t be blank”, “Title can’t be blank”, “Title is too short (minimum is 5 characters)”]
This code shows creating a new Post instance, attempting to save it and
getting false for a return value (indicating that the save failed), and
inspecting the errors of the post.
When you’re finished, type exit and hit return to exit the console.
TIP: Unlike the development web server, the console does not automatically load
your code afresh for each line. If you make changes to your models (in your editor)
while the console is open, type reload! at the console prompt to load them.
Let’s dive into the Rails code a little deeper to see how the application is
showing us the list of Posts. Open the file
app/controllers/posts_controller.rb and look at the
index action:
def index
@posts = Post.all
end
Post.all returns all of the posts currently in the database as an array
of Post records that we store in an instance variable called @posts.
TIP: For more information on finding records with Active Record, see Active
Record Query Interface.
The respond_to block handles both HTML and JSON calls to this action. If you
browse to http://localhost:3000/posts.json,
you’ll see a JSON containing all of the posts. The HTML format looks for a view
in app/views/posts/ with a name that corresponds to the action name. Rails
makes all of the instance variables from the action available to the view.
Here’s app/views/posts/index.html.erb:
<% @posts.each do |post| >
<% end %>
| Name | Title | Content | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| <= post.name > | <= post.title > | <= post.content > | <= link_to ‘Show’, post > | <= link_to ‘Edit’, edit_post_path(post) > | <= link_to ‘Destroy’, post, :confirm => ‘Are you sure?’, :method => :delete %> |
<%= link_to ‘New post’, new_post_path %>
This view iterates over the contents of the @posts array to display content
and links. A few things to note in the view:
- link_to builds a hyperlink to a particular destination
- edit_post_path and new_post_path are helpers that Rails provides as part of RESTful routing. You’ll see a variety of these helpers for the different actions that the controller includes.
NOTE. In previous versions of Rails, you had to use <%=h post.name %> so
that any HTML would be escaped before being inserted into the page. In Rails
3 and above, this is now the default. To get unescaped HTML, you now use <%= raw post.name %>.
TIP: For more details on the rendering process, see Layouts and Rendering in
Rails.
The view is only part of the story of how HTML is displayed in your web browser.
Rails also has the concept of layouts, which are containers for views. When
Rails renders a view to the browser, it does so by putting the view’s HTML into
a layout’s HTML. In previous versions of Rails, the rails generate scaffold
command would automatically create a controller specific layout, like
app/views/layouts/posts.html.erb, for the posts controller. However this has
been changed in Rails 3. An application specific layout is used for all the
controllers and can be found in app/views/layouts/application.html.erb. Open
this layout in your editor and modify the body tag to include the style directive
below:
<!DOCTYPE html>
Blog
<%= stylesheet_link_tag “application” >
<= javascript_include_tag “application” >
<= csrf_meta_tags %>
<%= yield %>
Now when you refresh the /posts page, you’ll see a gray background to the
page. This same gray background will be used throughout all the views.
Creating a new post involves two actions. The first is the new action, which
instantiates an empty Post object:
def new
@post = Post.new
end
The new.html.erb view displays this empty Post to the user:
<%= render ‘form’ %>
<%= link_to ‘Back’, posts_path %>
The <%= render ‘form’ %> line is our first introduction to partials in
Rails. A partial is a snippet of HTML and Ruby code that can be reused in
multiple locations. In this case, the form used to make a new post is basically
identical to the form used to edit a post, both having text fields for the name and
title, a text area for the content, and a button to create the new post or to update
the existing one.
If you take a look at views/posts/_form.html.erb file, you will see the
following:
<%= form_for(post) do |f| %>
<% if @post.errors.any? %>
<div id="errorExplanation">
<h2><%= pluralize(post.errors.count, “error”) > prohibited
this post from being saved:
- <= msg >
< @post.errors.full_messages.each do |msg| >
< end %>
<%= f.text_field :name %>
<%= f.text_field :title %>
<%= f.text_area :content %>
<% end %>
This partial receives all the instance variables defined in the calling view
file. In this case, the controller assigned the new Post object to @post,
which will thus be available in both the view and the partial as @post.
For more information on partials, refer to the Layouts and Rendering in
Rails guide.
The form_for block is used to create an HTML form. Within this block, you have
access to methods to build various controls on the form. For example,
f.text_field :name tells Rails to create a text input on the form and to hook
it up to the name attribute of the instance being displayed. You can only use
these methods with attributes of the model that the form is based on (in this
case name, title, and content). Rails uses form_for in preference to
having you write raw HTML because the code is more succinct, and because it
explicitly ties the form to a particular model instance.
The form_for block is also smart enough to work out if you are doing a New
Post or an Edit Post action, and will set the form action tags and submit
button names appropriately in the HTML output.
TIP: If you need to create an HTML form that displays arbitrary fields, not tied
to a model, you should use the form_tag method, which provides shortcuts for
building forms that are not necessarily tied to a model instance.
When the user clicks the Create Post button on this form, the browser will
send information back to the create action of the controller (Rails knows to
call the create action because the form is sent with an HTTP POST request;
that’s one of the conventions that were mentioned earlier):
def create
@post = Post.new(params[:post])
end
The create action instantiates a new Post object from the data supplied by the
user on the form, which Rails makes available in the params hash. After
successfully saving the new post, create returns the appropriate format that
the user has requested (HTML in our case). It then redirects the user to the
resulting post show action and sets a notice to the user that the Post was
successfully created.
If the post was not successfully saved, due to a validation error, then the
controller returns the user back to the new action with any error messages so
that the user has the chance to fix the error and try again.
The “Post was successfully created.” message is stored in the Rails
flash hash (usually just called the flash), so that messages can be carried
over to another action, providing the user with useful information on the status
of their request. In the case of create, the user never actually sees any page
rendered during the post creation process, because it immediately redirects to
the new Post as soon as Rails saves the record. The Flash carries over a message to
the next action, so that when the user is redirected back to the show action,
they are presented with a message saying “Post was successfully created.”
When you click the show link for a post on the index page, it will bring you
to a URL like http://localhost:3000/posts/1. Rails interprets this as a call
to the show action for the resource, and passes in 1 as the :id parameter.
Here’s the show action:
def show
@post = Post.find(params[:id])
end
The show action uses Post.find to search for a single record in the database
by its id value. After finding the record, Rails displays it by using
app/views/posts/show.html.erb:
<%= notice %>
Name: <%= @post.name %>
Title: <%= @post.title %>
Content: <%= @post.content %>
<%= link_to ‘Edit’, edit_post_path(@post) > |
<= link_to ‘Back’, posts_path %>
Like creating a new post, editing a post is a two-part process. The first step
is a request to edit_post_path(@post) with a particular post. This calls the
edit action in the controller:
def edit
@post = Post.find(params[:id])
end
After finding the requested post, Rails uses the edit.html.erb view to display
it:
<%= render ‘form’ %>
<%= link_to ‘Show’, @post > |
<= link_to ‘Back’, posts_path %>
Again, as with the new action, the edit action is using the form partial.
This time, however, the form will do a PUT action to the PostsController and the
submit button will display “Update Post”.
Submitting the form created by this view will invoke the update action within
the controller:
def update
@post = Post.find(params[:id])
end
In the update action, Rails first uses the :id parameter passed back from
the edit view to locate the database record that’s being edited. The
update_attributes call then takes the post parameter (a hash) from the request
and applies it to this record. If all goes well, the user is redirected to the
post’s show action. If there are any problems, it redirects back to the edit action to
correct them.
Finally, clicking one of the destroy links sends the associated id to the
destroy action:
def destroy
@post = Post.find(params[:id])
@post.destroy
end
The destroy method of an Active Record model instance removes the
corresponding record from the database. After that’s done, there isn’t any
record to display, so Rails redirects the user’s browser to the index action of
the controller.
Now that you’ve seen what a model built with scaffolding looks like, it’s time to
add a second model to the application. The second model will handle comments on
blog posts.
Models in Rails use a singular name, and their corresponding database tables use
a plural name. For the model to hold comments, the convention is to use the name
Comment. Even if you don’t want to use the entire apparatus set up by
scaffolding, most Rails developers still use generators to make things like
models and controllers. To create the new model, run this command in your
terminal:
$ rails generate model Comment commenter:string body:text post:references
This command will generate four files:
| File | Purpose |
|---|---|
| db/migrate/20100207235629_create_comments.rb | Migration to create the comments table in your database (your name will include a different timestamp) |
| app/models/comment.rb | The Comment model |
| test/unit/comment_test.rb | Unit testing harness for the comments model |
| test/fixtures/comments.yml | Sample comments for use in testing |
First, take a look at comment.rb:
class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :post
end
This is very similar to the post.rb model that you saw earlier. The difference
is the line belongs_to :post, which sets up an Active Record association.
You’ll learn a little about associations in the next section of this guide.
In addition to the model, Rails has also made a migration to create the
corresponding database table:
class CreateComments < ActiveRecord::Migration
def change
create_table :comments do |t|
t.string :commenter
t.text :body
t.references :post
end
The t.references line sets up a foreign key column for the association between
the two models. And the add_index line sets up an index for this association
column. Go ahead and run the migration:
$ rake db:migrate
Rails is smart enough to only execute the migrations that have not already been
run against the current database, so in this case you will just see:
== CreateComments: migrating =============
- create_table(:comments) add_index(:comments, :post_id)
→ 0.0008s
-
→ 0.0003s
== CreateComments: migrated (0.0012s) ========
Active Record associations let you easily declare the relationship between two
models. In the case of comments and posts, you could write out the relationships
this way:
- Each comment belongs to one post.
- One post can have many comments.
In fact, this is very close to the syntax that Rails uses to declare this
association. You’ve already seen the line of code inside the Comment model that
makes each comment belong to a Post:
class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :post
end
You’ll need to edit the post.rb file to add the other side of the association:
class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
validates :name, :presence => true
validates :title, :presence => true,
:length => { :minimum => 5 }
end
These two declarations enable a good bit of automatic behavior. For example, if
you have an instance variable @post containing a post, you can retrieve all
the comments belonging to that post as an array using @post.comments.
TIP: For more information on Active Record associations, see the Active Record
Associations guide.
As with the welcome controller, we will need to add a route so that Rails knows
where we would like to navigate to see comments. Open up the
config/routes.rb file again. Near the top, you will see the entry for posts
that was added automatically by the scaffold generator: resources
:posts. Edit it as follows:
resources :posts do
resources :comments
end
This creates comments as a nested resource within posts. This is another
part of capturing the hierarchical relationship that exists between posts and
comments.
TIP: For more information on routing, see the Rails Routing from the Outside
In guide.
With the model in hand, you can turn your attention to creating a matching
controller. Again, there’s a generator for this:
$ rails generate controller Comments
This creates six files and one empty directory:
| File/Directory | Purpose |
|---|---|
| app/controllers/comments_controller.rb | The Comments controller |
| app/views/comments/ | Views of the controller are stored here |
| test/functional/comments_controller_test.rb | The functional tests for the controller |
| app/helpers/comments_helper.rb | A view helper file |
| test/unit/helpers/comments_helper_test.rb | The unit tests for the helper |
| app/assets/javascripts/comment.js.coffee | CoffeeScript for the controller |
| app/assets/stylesheets/comment.css.scss | Cascading style sheet for the controller |
Like with any blog, our readers will create their comments directly after
reading the post, and once they have added their comment, will be sent back to
the post show page to see their comment now listed. Due to this, our
CommentsController is there to provide a method to create comments and delete
spam comments when they arrive.
So first, we’ll wire up the Post show template
(/app/views/posts/show.html.erb) to let us make a new comment:
<%= notice %>
Name: <%= @post.name %>
Title: <%= @post.title %>
Content: <%= @post.content %>
<%= form_for([@post, @post.comments.build]) do |f| >
<= f.label :commenter >
<= f.text_field :commenter %>
<%= f.text_area :body %>
<% end %>
<%= link_to ‘Edit Post’, edit_post_path(@post) > |
<= link_to ‘Back to Posts’, posts_path %> |
This adds a form on the Post show page that creates a new comment by
calling the CommentsController create action. Let’s wire that up:
class CommentsController < ApplicationController
def create
post = Post.find(params[:post_id])
@comment = @post.comments.create(params[:comment])
redirect_to post_path(post)
end
end
You’ll see a bit more complexity here than you did in the controller for posts.
That’s a side-effect of the nesting that you’ve set up. Each request for a
comment has to keep track of the post to which the comment is attached, thus the
initial call to the find method of the Post model to get the post in question.
In addition, the code takes advantage of some of the methods available for an
association. We use the create method on @post.comments to create and save
the comment. This will automatically link the comment so that it belongs to that
particular post.
Once we have made the new comment, we send the user back to the original post
using the post_path(@post) helper. As we have already seen, this calls the
show action of the PostsController which in turn renders the show.html.erb
template. This is where we want the comment to show, so let’s add that to the
app/views/posts/show.html.erb.
<%= notice %>
Name: <%= @post.name %>
Title: <%= @post.title %>
Content: <%= @post.content %>
<% @post.comments.each do |comment| >
Commenter:
<= comment.commenter %>
Comment: <%= comment.body %>
<% end %>
<%= form_for([@post, @post.comments.build]) do |f| >
<= f.label :commenter >
<= f.text_field :commenter %>
<%= f.text_area :body %>
<% end %>
<%= link_to ‘Edit Post’, edit_post_path(@post) > |
<= link_to ‘Back to Posts’, posts_path %> |
Now you can add posts and comments to your blog and have them show up in the
right places.
Now that we have posts and comments working, take a look at the
app/views/posts/show.html.erb template. It is getting long and awkward. We can
use partials to clean it up.
First we will make a comment partial to extract showing all the comments for the
post. Create the file app/views/comments/_comment.html.erb and put the
following into it:
Commenter: <%= comment.commenter %>
Comment: <%= comment.body %>
Then you can change app/views/posts/show.html.erb to look like the
following:
<%= notice %>
Name: <%= @post.name %>
Title: <%= @post.title %>
Content: <%= @post.content %>
<%= render @post.comments %>
<%= form_for([@post, @post.comments.build]) do |f| >
<= f.label :commenter >
<= f.text_field :commenter %>
<%= f.text_area :body %>
<% end %>
<%= link_to ‘Edit Post’, edit_post_path(@post) > |
<= link_to ‘Back to Posts’, posts_path %> |
This will now render the partial in app/views/comments/_comment.html.erb once
for each comment that is in the @post.comments collection. As the render
method iterates over the @post.comments collection, it assigns each
comment to a local variable named the same as the partial, in this case
comment which is then available in the partial for us to show.
Let us also move that new comment section out to its own partial. Again, you
create a file app/views/comments/_form.html.erb containing:
<%= form_for([@post, @post.comments.build]) do |f| >
<= f.label :commenter >
<= f.text_field :commenter %>
<%= f.text_area :body %>
<% end %>
Then you make the app/views/posts/show.html.erb look like the following:
<%= notice %>
Name: <%= @post.name %>
Title: <%= @post.title %>
Content: <%= @post.content %>
<%= render @post.comments %>
<%= render “comments/form” %>
<%= link_to ‘Edit Post’, edit_post_path(@post) > |
<= link_to ‘Back to Posts’, posts_path %> |
The second render just defines the partial template we want to render,
comments/form. Rails is smart enough to spot the forward slash in that
string and realize that you want to render the _form.html.erb file in
the app/views/comments directory.
The @post object is available to any partials rendered in the view because we
defined it as an instance variable.
Another important feature of a blog is being able to delete spam comments. To do
this, we need to implement a link of some sort in the view and a DELETE action
in the CommentsController.
So first, let’s add the delete link in the
app/views/comments/_comment.html.erb partial:
Commenter: <%= comment.commenter %>
Comment: <%= comment.body %>
<%= link_to ‘Destroy Comment’, [comment.post, comment], :confirm => ‘Are you sure?’, :method => :delete %>
Clicking this new “Destroy Comment” link will fire off a DELETE
/posts/:id/comments/:id to our CommentsController, which can then use
this to find the comment we want to delete, so let’s add a destroy action to our
controller:
class CommentsController < ApplicationController
def create @post = Post.find(params[:post_id]) @comment = @post.comments.create(params[:comment]) redirect_to post_path(@post) end def destroy @post = Post.find(params[:post_id]) @comment = @post.comments.find(params[:id]) @comment.destroy redirect_to post_path(@post) endend
The destroy action will find the post we are looking at, locate the comment
within the @post.comments collection, and then remove it from the
database and send us back to the show action for the post.
If you delete a post then its associated comments will also need to be deleted.
Otherwise they would simply occupy space in the database. Rails allows you to
use the dependent option of an association to achieve this. Modify the Post
model, app/models/post.rb, as follows:
class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
validates :name, :presence => true
validates :title, :presence => true,
:length => { :minimum => 5 }
has_many :comments, :dependent => :destroy
end
If you were to publish your blog online, anybody would be able to add, edit and
delete posts or delete comments.
Rails provides a very simple HTTP authentication system that will work nicely in
this situation.
In the PostsController we need to have a way to block access to the various
actions if the person is not authenticated, here we can use the Rails
http_basic_authenticate_with method, allowing access to the requested
action if that method allows it.
To use the authentication system, we specify it at the top of our
PostsController, in this case, we want the user to be authenticated on every
action, except for index and show, so we write that:
class PostsController < ApplicationController
http_basic_authenticate_with :name => “dhh”, :password => “secret”, :except => [:index, :show]- GET /posts
- GET /posts.json
def index
@posts = Post.all
respond_to do |format| - snipped for brevity
We also only want to allow authenticated users to delete comments, so in the
CommentsController we write:
class CommentsController < ApplicationController
http_basic_authenticate_with :name => “dhh”, :password => “secret”, :only => :destroy def create @post = Post.find(params[:post_id])- snipped for brevity
Now if you try to create a new post, you will be greeted with a basic HTTP
Authentication challenge
Another feature of your average blog is the ability to tag posts. To implement
this feature your application needs to interact with more than one model on a
single form. Rails offers support for nested forms.
To demonstrate this, we will add support for giving each post multiple tags,
right in the form where you create the post. First, create a new model to hold
the tags:
$ rails generate model Tag name:string post:references
Again, run the migration to create the database table:
$ rake db:migrate
Next, edit the post.rb file to create the other side of the association, and
to tell Rails (via the accepts_nested_attributes_for macro) that you intend to
edit tags via posts:
class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
validates :name, :presence => true
validates :title, :presence => true,
:length => { :minimum => 5 }
end
The :allow_destroy option tells Rails to enable destroying tags through the
nested attributes (you’ll handle that by displaying a “remove” checkbox on the
view that you’ll build shortly). The :reject_if option prevents saving new
tags that do not have any attributes filled in.
We will modify views/posts/_form.html.erb to render a partial to make a tag:
<% post.tags.build %>
<%= form_for(post) do |post_form| >
< if post.errors.any? %>
<div id="errorExplanation">
<h2><%= pluralize(post.errors.count, “error”) > prohibited this post from being saved:
- <= msg >
< @post.errors.full_messages.each do |msg| >
< end %>
<%= post_form.text_field :name %>
<%= post_form.text_field :title %>
<%= post_form.text_area :content %>
<% end %>
Note that we have changed the f in form_for(@post) do |f| to post_form to
make it easier to understand what is going on.
This example shows another option of the render helper, being able to pass in
local variables, in this case, we want the local variable form in the partial
to refer to the post_form object.
We also add a @post.tags.build at the top of this form. This is to make
sure there is a new tag ready to have its name filled in by the user. If you do
not build the new tag, then the form will not appear as there is no new Tag
object ready to create.
Now create the folder app/views/tags and make a file in there called
_form.html.erb which contains the form for the tag:
<%= form.fields_for :tags do |tag_form| >
<= tag_form.label :name, ‘Tag:’ >
<= tag_form.text_field :name %>
<% end %>
Finally, we will edit the app/views/posts/show.html.erb template to
show our tags.
<%= notice %>
Name: <%= @post.name %>
Title: <%= @post.title %>
Content: <%= @post.content %>
Tags: <%= @post.tags.map { |t| t.name }.join(", ") %>
<%= render @post.comments %>
<%= render “comments/form” %>
<%= link_to ‘Edit Post’, edit_post_path(@post) > |
<= link_to ‘Back to Posts’, posts_path %> |
With these changes in place, you’ll find that you can edit a post and its tags
directly on the same view.
However, that method call @post.tags.map { |t| t.name }.join(", ") is
awkward, we could handle this by making a helper method.
View Helpers live in app/helpers and provide small snippets of reusable
code for views. In our case, we want a method that strings a bunch of objects
together using their name attribute and joining them with a comma. As this is
for the Post show template, we put it in the PostsHelper.
Open up app/helpers/posts_helper.rb and add the following:
module PostsHelper
def join_tags(post)
post.tags.map { |t| t.name }.join(", ")
end
end
Now you can edit the view in app/views/posts/show.html.erb to look like
this:
<%= notice %>
Name: <%= @post.name %>
Title: <%= @post.title %>
Content: <%= @post.content %>
Tags: <%= join_tags(@post) %>
<%= render @post.comments %>
<%= render “comments/form” %>
<%= link_to ‘Edit Post’, edit_post_path(@post) > |
<= link_to ‘Back to Posts’, posts_path %> |
Now that you’ve seen your first Rails application, you should feel free to
update it and experiment on your own. But you don’t have to do everything
without help. As you need assistance getting up and running with Rails, feel
free to consult these support resources:
- The Ruby on Rails guides
- The Ruby on Rails Tutorial
- The Ruby on Rails mailing list
- The #rubyonrails channel on irc.freenode.net
Rails also comes with built-in help that you can generate using the rake command-line utility:
- Running rake doc:guides will put a full copy of the Rails Guides in the doc/guides folder of your application. Open doc/guides/index.html in your web browser to explore the Guides.
- Running rake doc:rails will put a full copy of the API documentation for Rails in the doc/api folder of your application. Open doc/api/index.html in your web browser to explore the API documentation.
The easiest way to work with Rails is to store all external data as UTF-8. If
you don’t, Ruby libraries and Rails will often be able to convert your native
data into UTF-8, but this doesn’t always work reliably, so you’re better off
ensuring that all external data is UTF-8.
If you have made a mistake in this area, the most common symptom is a black
diamond with a question mark inside appearing in the browser. Another common
symptom is characters like “ü” appearing instead of “ü”. Rails takes a number
of internal steps to mitigate common causes of these problems that can be
automatically detected and corrected. However, if you have external data that is
not stored as UTF-8, it can occasionally result in these kinds of issues that
cannot be automatically detected by Rails and corrected.
Two very common sources of data that are not UTF-8:
- Your text editor: Most text editors (such as Textmate), default to saving files as
UTF-8. If your text editor does not, this can result in special characters that you
enter in your templates (such as é) to appear as a diamond with a question mark inside
in the browser. This also applies to your I18N translation files.
Most editors that do not already default to UTF-8 (such as some versions of
Dreamweaver) offer a way to change the default to UTF-8. Do so. - Your database. Rails defaults to converting data from your database into UTF-8 at
the boundary. However, if your database is not using UTF-8 internally, it may not
be able to store all characters that your users enter. For instance, if your database
is using Latin-1 internally, and your user enters a Russian, Hebrew, or Japanese
character, the data will be lost forever once it enters the database. If possible,
use UTF-8 as the internal storage of your database.