I'm working on a Rails app and I've come across a situation where I'm unsure of the cleanest way to proceed.
I posted a question on SO with code samples and such - it has received no answers, and the more I think about the problem, the more I think I might be approaching this the wrong way. (See the SO question at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9521319/how-to-reference-form-when-rendering-partial-from-js-erb-file)
So, in more of a generic architecture type question: Right now I have a form where a user can add a new recipe. The form also allows the user to select ingredients (it uses a collection_select which contains Ingredient.all). The catch is - I'd like the user to be able to add a new ingredient on the fly, without leaving the recipe form.
Using a hidden div and some jQuery/AJAX, I have a link the user can click to popup a modal form containing ingredients/new.html.erb which is a simple form. When that form is submitted, I call ingredients/create.js.erb to validate the ingredient was saved and hide the modal div. Now I am back to my recipe form, but my collection_select hasn't updated.
It seems I have a few choices here:
try and re-render the collection_select portion of the form so it grabs a new list of ingredients. This was the method I was attempting when I wrote the SO question. The problem I run into is the partial I use for the collection_select needs the parent form passed in, and when I try and render from the JS file I don't know how to pass it the form object.
Reload the recipe form. This works (the collection_select now contains the new ingredient), but the user loses any progress they made on the recipe form. I would need a way to persist the form data - I thought about manually passing the values back and forth, but that is sloppy and there has to be a better way...
Try and manually insert the tags using jQuery - this would be simple, but because I'm allowing for multiple ingredients to be added, I can't be certain what ID to target.
Now, I can't be the only person to have this issue - so is there an easier way I'm missing? I like option 2 above, but I don't know if there's an easy way to grab the entire params hash as if I had submitted the main recipes form.
Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction so I can find an answer to this... If this doesn't make any sense at all, let me know - I can post code samples if you want, but most of the pertinent code is up on the SO question.
Thanks!
