Nacho

( New Add Chooser )

Rails models often have has_many :through relations that can be added through various forms. In order to make data entry more efficient with creating a single record and its related records we can use nacho to create multiple forms in several modals making a single form function as many.

• Rails 4.0+
• jQuery
• Bootstrap 3.0+

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'nacho'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install nacho

This gem add two new form heplers

nacho_select

and a corresponding tag helper

nacho_select_tag

The javasctip plugin needs to be included to add to your application.js manifest.

//= require nacho

To create the form for the modal body, the partial needs to be rendered before passing it as an option to the helper. (This may change with the sepration of the view renderer in Rails 5)

To create a nacho for to add an Author to a Book, you can do the following.

= form_for(@book) do |f|
    = f.label :author
    - options = { partial: render('author/form'), value_key: :id, text_key: :name, new_key: :id, selected: @book.author.id }
    = f.nacho_select :author_id, Author.all.pluck(:name, :id), options, {class: 'select-nacho'}

The element will have to be initialized via jQurey plugin.

$(doocument).on('ready page:change', function(){
    $('.select-nacho').nacho();
});

The options hash options can take the folloing values:

• :include_blank should include a blank in the select options, forced to true if the choices is empty
• :new_option_text The text to display on the option to trigger the modal
• :value_key The key for the JSON options hash array that the <option> value will use
• :text_key The key for the JSON options hash array that the <option> will display
• :new_key The key for the JSON top level key that has the value for the newly created item
• :modal_title The title of the modal that will be displayed
• :partial The form partial for the modal body. Has to pre-rendered like partial: render('author/form')

nacho-select:updated is triggered on the select element that was just updated via adding a new record.

The jQurey plugin submits the form via AJAX.

The plugin addes "remote"="true" to the inner form at initialization.

The controller need to have a JSON responder on the create action for the target model.

Here is an example of what the Author controller.

def create
    @author = Author.new(author_params)
    
    respond_to do |format|
      if @author.save
        format.html { redirect_to author, notice: 'Author was successfully created.' }
        format.json {
          @authors = Author.all
        }
      else
        format.html { render :new }
        format.json { render json: @author.errors, status: :unprocessable_entity }
      end
    end
end

And the corresponding jBuilder template, create.json.jbuilder.

json.id @author.id
json.options do
  json.array!(@authors) do |author|
    json.extract! author, :id, :name
  end
end

The jQuery plugin has to recieve the JSON response data with a key with value of the new item and an options array with the data to repopulate the select options.

Similar to:

{
	id: <id of new record>,
    options: [
    	{
          id: ...,
          name: ...
        },
        ...
    ]
}

With the helper options

{
	<new_key>: <id of new record>,
    options: [
    	{
          <new_key>: ...,
          <text_key>: ...
        },
        ...
    ]
}

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/[USERNAME]/nacho. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.