Handling forms in rails

Question

I am a little confused with forms in RoR.

I have a contacts page with a corresponding method in my controller. What I am trying to do is have a form so people can leave a message. I will then be emailing that message to myself.

I have the form and everything created. However, I am a little confused on how I would actually get the data from the form once they hit the submit button. would it just be accessible through my contacts method in my controller using params[:message]?

Also, what if I had multiple forms on one page? Would I just be doing params[:message1], params[:message2], etc., in the contacts method in my controller?

Answer 1

Take a look at this answer for details on what exactly the params hash is. When you reference params[:message], this implies that you are POST'ing to your controller action with, say, "message[subject]=abc123", which Rails helpfully turns into a hash with a key like: params[:message]['subject'].

If you're looking to send an email, check out mail_form, which simplifies creating a non-database-backed model that get's turned into an email.

Lastly, about having multiple forms on a page: each form POST's to its action and includes all of the form elements that are children of that form in the DOM. So, only the children of that message will actually be included in the params[:message] hash. You can use fields_for to have multiple models within a single form.