Validations with form_tag

Now that we've learned to handle the server side of validations, we need to take care of the client side.

At this point, we'll be in step three of the following flow:

1. User fills out the form and hits "Submit", transmitting the form data via a POST request.
2. The controller sees that validations have failed, and re-renders the form.
3. The view displays the errors to the user.

Objectives

After this lesson, you'll be able to...

• Prefill in form values based on an instance
• Print out full error messages based on an invalid instance
• Introspect on errors for a field
• Apply an error class to invalid fields

Pre-Filling Form Values

No one likes re-doing work. First, let's make sure we know how to pre-fill forms with the user's input so they don't have to type everything all over again.

There are two ways to pre-fill forms in Rails: form_tag and form_for. form_for is very heavy on Rails magic and continues to baffle scientists to this day, so we'll be going over form_tag first.

Let's start with a vanilla form (no pre-filled values yet), using the FormTagHelper:

<!-- app/views/people/new.html.erb //-->

<%= form_tag("/people") do %>
  Name: <%= text_field_tag "name" %><br>
  Email: <%= text_field_tag "email" %>
  <%= submit_tag "Create Person" %>
<% end %>

Here's what the HTML output will look like:

<form action="/people" accept-charset="UTF-8" method="post">
  <input name="utf8" type="hidden" value="&#x2713;" />
  <input type="hidden" name="authenticity_token" value="TKTzvQF+atT/XHG/7h48xKVdXvILdiPj83XQhn2mWBNNhvv0Oh5YfAl2LM3DlHsQjbMOFVsYEyOwj+rPaSk3Bw==" />
  Name: <input type="text" name="name" id="name" /><br />
  Email: <input type="text" name="email" id="email" />
  <input type="submit" name="commit" value="Create Person" />
</form>

We're working with this Person model:

# app/models/person.rb

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  validates :name, format: { without: /[0-9]/, message: "does not allow numbers" }
  validates :email, uniqueness: true
end

This means validation will fail if we put numbers into the "Name" field, and the form will be re-rendered with the invalid @person object available.

Remember that our create action now looks like this:

# app/controllers/people_controller.rb

  def create
    @person = Person.new(person_params)

    if @person.valid?
      @person.save
      redirect_to person_path(@person)
    else
      # re-render the :new template WITHOUT throwing away the invalid @person
      render :new
    end
  end

With this in mind, we can use the invalid @person object to "re-fill" the usually-empty new form with the user's invalid entries. This way they don't have to re-type anything.

(You wouldn't always want to do this –– for example, with credit card numbers –– because you want to minimize the amount of times sensitive information travels back and forth over the internet.)

Now, let's plug the information back into the form:

<!-- app/views/people/new.html.erb //-->

<%= form_tag "/people" do %>
  Name: <%= text_field_tag "name", @person.name %><br>
  Email: <%= text_field_tag "email", @person.email %>
  <%= submit_tag "Create Person" %>
<% end %>

As you can see from the docs, the second argument to text_field_tag, as with most form tag helpers, is the "default" value. The HTML for the two field inputs used to look like this:

Name: <input type="text" name="name" id="name" /><br>
Email: <input type="text" name="email" id="email" />

But now it will look like this:

Name: <input type="text" name="name" id="name" value="Jane Developer" /><br />
Email: <input type="text" name="email" id="email" value="jane@developers.fake" />

When the browser renders those inputs, they'll be pre-filled with the data in their value attributes.

This is the same technique used to create edit/update forms.

We can also use the same form code for empty and pre-filled forms because @person = Person.new will create an empty model object whose attributes are all nil.

Displaying All Errors With errors.full_messages

When a model fails validation, its errors attribute is filled with information about what went wrong. Rails creates an ActiveModel::Errors object to carry this information.

The simplest way to show errors is to just spit them all out at the top of the form by iterating over @person.errors.full_messages. But first, we'll have to check whether there are errors to display with @person.errors.any?.

<% if @person.errors.any? %>
  <div id="error_explanation">
    <h2>There were some errors:</h2>
    <ul>
      <% @person.errors.full_messages.each do |message| %>
        <li><%= message %></li>
      <% end %>
    </ul>
  </div>
<% end %>

If the model has two errors, there will be two items in full_messages, which could result in the following HTML:

<div id="error_explanation">
  <h2>There were some errors:</h2>
  <ul>
    <li>Name does not allow numbers</li>
    <li>Email is already taken</li>
  </ul>
</ul>

This is nice, but it's not very helpful from a user interface standpoint. It would be much better if the incorrect fields themselves were highlighted somehow.

Displaying Pre-Field Errors With errors[]

ActiveModel::Errors has much more than just a list of full_message error strings. It can also be used to access field-specific errors by interacting with it like a hash. If the field has errors, they will be returned in an array of strings:

@person.errors[:name] #=> ["does not allow numbers"]
@person.errors[:email] #=> []

With this in mind, we can conditionally "error-ify" each field in the form, targeting the divs containing each field:

<div class="field">
  <%= label_tag "name", "Name" %>
  <%= text_field_tag "name", @person.name %>
</div>

Rails will add a class if there are errors, but you can manually do so like this:

<div class="field<%= ' field_with_errors' if @person.errors[:name].any? %>">
  <%= label_tag "name", "Name" %>
  <%= text_field_tag "name", @person.name %>
</div>

You can override ActionView::Base.field_error_proc to change it to something that suits your UI. It's currently defined as this within ActionView::Base:.

Note: There is a deliberate space added in ' field_with_errors' in the example above. If @person.errors[:name].any? validates to true, the goal here is to produce two class names separated by a space (class=field field_with_errors). Without the added space, we would get class=fieldfield_with_errors instead!

The Whole Picture

By now, our full form has grown quite a bit:

<%= form_tag("/people") do %>
  <% if @person.errors.any? %>
    <div id="error_explanation">
      <h2>There were some errors:</h2>
      <ul>
        <% @person.errors.full_messages.each do |message| %>
          <li><%= message %></li>
        <% end %>
      </ul>
    </div>
  <% end %>


  <div class="field<%= ' field_with_errors' if @person.errors[:name].any? %>">
    <%= label_tag "name", "Name" %>
    <%= text_field_tag "name", @person.name %>
  </div>

  <div class="field<%= ' field_with_errors' if @person.errors[:email].any? %>">
    <%= label_tag "email", "Email" %>
    <%= text_field_tag "email", @person.email %>
  </div>

  <%= submit_tag "Create" %>
<% end %>

Notice that some whitespace has been added for "breathing room" and increased readability. Additionally, indentation has been very carefully maintained.

It's already starting to feel pretty unwieldy to manually manage all of this conditional display logic, but, without an understanding of the dirty details, we can't even begin to use more powerful tools like form_for correctly.

Next, we'll dive into a lab using form_tag and artisanally craft our own markup.