I'm working on my first public Rails application for managing small skydiving businesses. The primary feature is to track when a person gets in an aircraft to make a skydive. In skydiver speak, that's: "Jumpers are manifested in a Slot on a Load". I'm using a model named Account to hold Jumpers, Pilots and in fact anyone who does business with the dropzone.
So, My models look like:
class Load < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :slots, :dependent => :destroy
end
and:
class Slot < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :account
end
The form for editing a load contains:
<%= render :partial => 'slot', :collection => @load.slots %>
and the _slots.html.erb partial contains something like:
<% fields_for "load[slot_attributes][]", slot do |slot_form| -%>
<%= slot_form.label :account_name, 'Jumper:' %>
<%= slot_form.text_field :account_name %>
<% end -%>
This all works great, so it's time for a little flair ... what I'd like is for the Account.name field to present a list of accounts that match the text that I've typed so far and allow me to pick one (like the Google search field does these days).
The instructions in the README describe the steps to get the simplest example working but left me scratching my head. What I needed was the following...
In SlotsController (something I didn't even need before):
class SlotsController < ApplicationController
autocomplete_for :account, :name, :order => 'name ASC'
end
in _slot.html.erb, I changed to:
<% fields_for "load[slot_attributes][]", slot do |slot_form| -%>
<%= slot_form.label :account_name, 'Jumper:' %>
<%= slot_form.text_field :account_name, :class => 'autocomplete',
:autocomplete_url => autocomplete_for_account_name_slots_path %>
<% end -%>
I updated my routes.rb to include:
map.resources :slots, :collection => { :autocomplete_for_account_name => :get}
Finally, I added to my application.html.erb layout:
<%= stylesheet_link_tag 'site', 'jquery.autocomplete' %>
<%= javascript_include_tag 'jquery', 'jquery.autocomplete', 'application', 'prototype' %>
And it works like a champ!
