Workshop 5 - DEVELOPER’S THREAD

PART A

In this part of the workshop 5, interaction between controller and view, on MVC structure, will be shown. We are going to use ruby on rails development environment to do this.


1. Create the Rails application framework in the projects folder: C:\InstantRails\...\projects\>rails animals



2. Running the application on localhost:3000 using the WeBrick ruby server (or Mongrel as alternative) and access via Web browser at http://localhost:3000/



3. Create the controller to make the application do an action. This is under the controller-action/model-view structure.

Stop the WEBrick server each time you edit Ruby classes and then re-start or refresh the views you are testing. Use the Ruby command below:

>ruby script/generate controller Mammal

The mammal_controller.rb contains just a bare class description:

class MammalController


4. Test the controller by starting the WEBrick server and navaigatibng the browser to http://localhost:3000/mammal Note how the controller name is appended to the end of the URL and that no action resulted because there are no controller methods.



5. Create an action by editing and saving the mammal_controller.rb class in projects\animals\app\controllers using your text editor to add the method below:

class MammalController



6. Start the WEBrick server and browse at http://localhost:3000/mammals/breathe where you will get a “missing template” message since it is missing a view for the breathe method.

Rails is trying to connect the breathe method action of the mammal controller to a view, by using the action’s name – breathe. This view template is created as breathe.rhtml and stored in the \projects\animals\views\mammal directory.

7. Create and save a view in that directory by using a text editor to create a view called breathe.rhtml

8. Try Ruby code and HTML in the action view by using the <%....%>wrapper around the inserted Ruby code.

PART B

In this part of the workshop 5, we are going to show how to pass data from an action to a view.

PART C

In this part of the workshop 5, we are going to show using of radio buttons, text box and combo box. In addition to this, you will see how to pass data from a public file to view file through controller.