Rails, how do you submit a form with a text link?

Question

I am trying to get this form to submit correctly. Here's what I have so far:

<% form_for(:user, :url => update_user_setting_path, :remote => true, :html => {:method => :post, :class => "search_form general_form"}) do |f| %> 

and the button renders with this code:

<li><%= link_to raw("<span class='button approve'><span><span>SAVE</span></span></span>"), :action => 'create' %></li>

I am using action create, is this correct?

Here is the rendered form tag:

<form method="post" data-remote="true" class="search_form general_form" action="/settings/2/update_user" accept-charset="UTF-8">

What am I missing? Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

No, you are not using link_to properly. You need to use a submit tag to submit your form, not a link_to tag, for example:

<% form_for(:user, :url => update_user_setting_path, :remote => true, :html => {:method => :post, :class => "search_form general_form"}) do |f| %>
  ...
  <li><%= f.submit "Save" %></li>

If you want to use a text link you'll have to have javascript submit the form. For example, if you are using jQuery you could do the following:

<%= link_to 'Save', "#", :onclick=>"$('.search_form').submit()" %>

Answer 2

I like Pan's solution but I prefer to use the ID of the form directly which you can get from the dom_id(obj). The form_for helper also uses dom_id(obj) to assign the form's ID. This way you aren't dependent on setting classes by hand or subject to accidentally submitting more than one form that share the same CSS class. It looks a little stranger but I usually have a custom FormBuilder anyway so I just add a generic link_to_submit method to encapsulate this:

<%= link_to 'Save', "#", :onclick => "$('##{dom_id(@user)}').submit()" %>