I'm new to wheels and still learning. It seems to me that every post of a form needs to call an action that maps to a method in the particular model. However, is it possible for a form to post to itself?
What I want to avoid is people navigating to an action view directly - which seems to throw an error. I'd also like to do a lot of self-posting because it might mean I won't have to have a lot of empty files laying around in my views folder.
Another advantage I was thinking about was the fact that if a form is self posting, I'd have the benefit of having it used globally. For example, I might have a form in my header that I want my user to fill out anywhere in the website. Or is there a way to detect where the user came from and do a dynamic redirectTo?
Many thanks,
Michael.
To avoid errors due to users browsing to post actions, look at Verification:
http://cfwheels.org/docs/chapter/verification
So your create and update actions would be configured like this in the controller's init:
<cffunction name="init">
<cfset verifies(only="create,update", post=true, params="comment", paramsTypes="struct")>
</cffunction>
It is not unreasonable to redirect the user back to the previous page after the form has posted. Look at redirectTo(back=true) for your success action.
http://cfwheels.org/docs/1-1/function/redirectto
<cffunction name="init">
<cfscript>
verifies(only="create,update", params="comment", paramsTypes="struct");
provides("html,json");
</cfscript>
</cffunction>
<cffunction name="create">
<cfscript>
comment = model("comment").new(params.comment);
comment.save();
if (isAjax())
{
renderWith(comment);
}
else
{
if (comment.hasErrors())
redirectTo(back=true, error="There was an error saving the comment.");
else
redirectTo(back=true, success="The comment was posted successfully.");
}
</cfscript>
</cffunction>
Yes, I like Craig's answer that AJAX is a good solution, but you also need to consider what happens if the AJAX fails and the form is ultimately posted to the URL through a non-AJAX request. Best to provide a fully accessible experience.
Michael, you may want to consider making a form like that Ajaxy. In other words, you can have it submit the form data, using jQuery or similar, to a remote CFC method (i.e., a method whose access attribute is set to "remote"). That CFC could work its magic per usual and return the appropriate response that you act on in your view.
Here is a link to the Wheels docs "Wheels, Ajax and You". There's some nice stuff in that section and it might be what you're looking for here!
What little I know about Wheels is that it's an opinionated MVC framework inspired by Ruby on Rails. You are requesting help on avoiding the the Model-View-Controller pattern by having the form post to itself and bypass the controller. This should not be possible or at least discouraged in such a framework.
A good MVC framework should allow you to reuse your model, views and in some cases even controllers - globally.
Related
I used Codeigniter to build my site, and everything is going peachy, except when it comes to dealing with pagination. Because database queries are driven by data passed from my URL, this is screwing everything up. I'm SURE I'm overlooking something obvious, but this is my issue:
/events/town/venue/event-name
All fine and works as expected; the method takes the parameters from the URL to get the data and deliver it. But my question is - what do I do when I want to paginate my Events page? I.e.
/events/2
/events/3
...etc
As far as my controller, and my routes are concerned, the page number here is considered a town, which it isn't. How do I get around this?
Many thanks
"Test" your town or "page number" uri segment, if it is integer then
you sure know that you are looking for pagination thing, otherwise
"normal" behavior of your controller/method pattern.
using PHPs is_numeric.
A little pseudo code:
if (is_numeric($this->uri->segment(n))) {
//pagination stuff
} else {
//regular behavior
}
In case you are using aplication/config/routes.php consider using _remap() instead (for this certain controller).
or use routes as following:
$route['events/(:num)'] = "events/page/$1"; //pagination "behind the scene" with method "page" (that is not seen by user).
$route['events/town/venue/(:any)'] = "events/town/venue/$1";
We've got a few emails that get sent out by our ASP.NET MVC 3 application.
In one of the emails, we want to add "Did you find this helpful?" to the footer of the email.
If they click "Yes", some action needs to be taken in the database.
What approach should i take for these links?
I don't really like the idea of doing a GET (e.g when they click the link), which then adds something to the database. GET's should never update state. Is there a way i can make it do a POST instead?
I'm using ActionMailer to perform emails, if that matters.
EDIT:
To be clear, i'm how asking "how" to implement the MVC side of things. I know i can create an action which takes the id, etc and saves to the DB, but i'm asking about what is the correct approach from a REST-style point of view.
You can create a form and do a POST in an email but it wont work with certain mail clients. Here is a reference from 2007 that shows where it works and where it doesn't:
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2435/how-forms-perform-in-html-emai/
ETA: A POST would of course fit the REST pattern but probably not a good option in your case. Since you are presumably just incrementing a counter for helpfulness, having this URL exposed shouldn't cause much of a problem.
So I'm trying to extend the Blog tutorial adding some comments:
Post hasMany Comments
I want to display the add comment form in the same view as the 'post view'. Thing is I don't know the best way to get this approach. I thought about three ways:
Creating a function in Comments Controller to handle the data.
Creating a function in Post Controller to handle the data.
Deal with the data in the same function that deals with the post views.
The main problem with the two first 'solutions' is that the validation errors doesn't show up in the form unless I do some messy hacking of saving the invalidated field in a session variable and then parsing the variable on the beforeFilter callback, like this:
function beforeFilter () {
if ($this->Session->check('comment_error')) {
$this->Post->Comment->validationErrors = $this->Session->read('comment_error');
$this->Session->delete('comment_error');
}
}
What I basically do is adapt the invalidated fields to the actual view and allow it to show properly. This works really well, but it seems so ugly to me. What would be the best approach?
Another related question: should a controller reflect a view? I mean on that example, I thought about only having a Comment Model and dealing with all the data in the controller where's the form to add a comment (even though it's in the Post Controller).
Sounds like you're looking for the Mutlivalidatable behaviour: http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/dardosordi/2008/07/29/multivalidatablebehavior-using-many-validation-rulesets-per-model
This allows you to define more than 1 validation ruleset per model. Use your controller to determine which one to apply upon posting something.
P.S. I have only ever used this on a Cake 1.3 project, not sure if it'll work on 2.0.
I see it this way:
Under every post there is an input box "Add comment" with a button to submit.
After submitting some text a form redirects to comments_controller where the comment is saved with this post_id, body, author, date etc.
After the comment is saved and all the logic is done it takes you back to the post.
Under each post there are all related comments displayed (having the same post_id sorted by date or whatever).
I know that we can design the layout in *.xml then in the action just invoke loadLayout, and renderLayout to render the blocks/views.
But, I have a question is:
- How can I load the layout at runtime?
If we have an action which does not really design its layout and will be decided how to render at runtime.
You can please consider the answer from the question for more clear.
Writing a new answer because it seems that you actually DO still want to render, you just want to render a different route's layout XML updates. I believe the _forward() method from Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Action will allow you to do what you are describing with the least amount of pain.
You should add your action controller directory ahead of the catalog directory, create a ProductController with a viewAction, and check customer is not logged in - in this check you would call $this->_forward('customer','account','login');.
This approach though is going to require more effort in order to be usable, as I imagine that you want the user to be sent to the product page upon login. Have you seen Vinai Kopp's Login Only Catalog module? It should do this for you.
loadLayout() and renderLayout() just execute block output method toHtml() (usually) and take the resulting strings and apply them to the response object via appendBody(). In an action controller you can just call $this->getResponse()->setBody('response string'). How you build the string is up to you.
You can also use Mage_Core_Block_Flush to immediately send output to the browser without using the response object.
Scenario:
I have a Board model in my Rails server side, and an Android device is trying to post some content to a specific board via a POST. Finally, the server needs to send back a response to the Android device.
How do I parse the POST manually (or do I need to)? I am not sure how to handle this kind of external request. I looked into Metal, Middleware, HttpParty; but none of them seems to fit what I am trying to do. The reason I want to parse it manually is because some of the information I want will not be part of the parameters.
Does anyone know a way to approach this problem?
I am also thinking about using SSL later on, how might this affect the problem?
Thank you in advance!! :)
I was trying to make a cross-domain request from ie9 to my rails app, and I needed to parse the body of a POST manually because ie9's XDR object restricts the contentType that we can send to text/plain, rather than application/x-www-urlencoded (see this post). Originally I had just been using the params hash provided by the controller, but once I restricted the contentType and dataType in my ajax request, that hash no longer contained the right information.
Following the URL in the comment above (link), I learned the how to recover that information. The author mentions that in a rails controller we always have access to a request variable that gives us an instance of the ActionDispatch::Request object. I tried to use request.query_string to get at the request body, but that just returned an empty string. A bit of snooping in the API, though, uncovered the raw_post method. That method returned exactly what I needed!
To "parse it manually" you could iterate over the string returned by request.raw_post and do whatever you want, but I don't recommend it. I used Rack::Utils.parse_nested_query, as suggested in Arthur Gunn's answer to this question, to parse the raw_post into a hash. Once it is in hash form, you can shove whatever else you need in there, and then merge it with the params hash. Doing this meant I didn't have to change much else in my controller!
params.merge!(Rack::Utils.parse_nested_query(request.raw_post))
Hope that helps someone!
Not sure exactly what you mean by "manually", posts are normally handled by the "create" or "update" methods in the controller. Check out the controller for your Board model, and you can add code to the appropriate method. You can access the params with the params hash.
You should be more specific about what you are trying to do. :)