I am following along with the Ruby on Rails tutorial guide for getting started and am in section 5.12 Using partials to clean up duplication in views. I understand why partials are used per the D.R.Y. convention, however, I am curious about a difference in the new.html.erb and edit.html.erb. Specifically, prior to using the partial _form.html.erb file, the edit.html.erb file explicitly called method: :patch
<%= form_for :article, url: article_path(@article), method: :patch do |f| %>
<% if @article.errors.any? %>
<div id="error_explanation">
...
... and now the _form.html.erb file covers both new & edit without explicitly calling PATCH:
<%= form_for @article do |f| %>
<% if @article.errors.any? %>
<div id="error_explanation">
...
Is PATCH still being invoked "behind the scenes" for editing?
As mentioned in the tutorial you shared:
The reason we can use this shorter, simpler form_for declaration to stand in for either of the other forms is that @article is a resource corresponding to a full set of RESTful routes, and Rails is able to infer which URI and method to use.
Also, from the reference given there:
For an existing resource
or record
for @post
, it is equivalent to:
<%= form_for @post, as: :post, url: post_path(@post), method: :patch, html: { class: "edit_post", id: "edit_post_45" } do |f| %>
...
<% end %>
Whereas, for a new record of the resource, i.e. Post.new
, it is equivalent to
<%= form_for @post, as: :post, url: posts_path, html: { class: "new_post", id: "new_post" } do |f| %>
...
<% end %>
Thus, in this case, magic lies in the rails with 2 things, helping rails understand what to do with this form:
- Your defined routes for your model,
resources :article
- The type(Existing record or a new record) of
resource
object passed to form_for
.
Yes. form_for
checks whether the model is persisted to know whether it needs to perform a POST
(create) or PATCH
(update).