Rails - Jan 2006 - Persistent form data (using sessions?)

Hi all,

I''ve been struggling with this problem for the past 2 days and still 
haven''t found a good solution - any help would be appreciated!

I have a ''list'' page that lists all products from a DB.  On
top of that
listing I have a little box where the user can specify
''filter''
parameters (eg, book name equals ''foo'').  The list below is
refreshed
via ajax everytime one of these filter parameters changes.

What I am trying to do is make the filter parameters persistent 
throughout the session, ie if the user set a filter (name, type of book, 
etc) in the filter box on the list page, then leaves the list view to do 
something else (eg look at the details of one of the books), and then 
returns, I''d like a) the list on the list page to still be filtered
and,
more importantly, I''d like b) the various text_fields that make up the 
filter box to be populated with the values the user selected earlier.

I can do a) with a Filter class that I added to the book model which 
generates a SQL conditions string according to the user selections. 
I''m
struggling with b) - I can''t find an elegant way to preserve the 
text_field states between sessions.  I''ve tried putting the filter box 
into a new controller and model, but then I run into problems because 
the filter model doesn''t have any database backend.

Thanks for any suggestions you might have!!

Felix

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Anyone?

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Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

you need to use sessions.

Just do something like

@session[:filterform] = Hash.new
@session[:filterform] = @params[:book].attributes

 @book = Book.new
 @book.attributes = @session[:filterform]  if @session[:filterform]

then in your view all the <%= text_field ''book'',
''isbn'' %> should be populated

adam

On 1/30/06, Felix M. <cdfpmf@gmail.com> wrote:
> Anyone?
>
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> Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
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> Rails mailing list
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Adam Denenberg wrote:
> you need to use sessions.
> 
Thanks a lot for your reply!  It seems so much more obvious now! 
Here''s
what I did (pretty much exactly as you suggested, I just had to modify 
it a bit):

    # store the filter parameters
    @site_search = Site.new(params[:site])
    @session[:filterform] = Hash.new
    @session[:filterform] = @site_search.attributes

...and then in the list action
    @site = Site.new
    @site.attributes = @session[:filterform] if @session[:filterform]

Thanks again!

Felix

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Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.