The correct way to handle invalid form submissions in Rails

Question

I\'m new to rails and am not sure I agree with the way I\'ve things done in some of the tutorials I\'ve gone through. The issue has to do with how to handle invalid form sub

Answer 1

I know this is an old question, but one approach I've been playing with lately is to submit the form with AJAX, even if it wouldn't otherwise require it. This lets you submit it to the default create/update action as far as the routes go, but the URL in the browser doesn't change. The response can be a simple 200 for success with a link to the /index page or wherever you redirect to on a successful save, or a "400 bad request" with error message(s) if data was invalid.

The biggest downfall is that the display of the error messages and invalid fields is now entirely the responsibility of your client side javascript. This becomes a much smaller problem and can even be a good thing once you're using something like Backbone or KnockoutJS on the client side.