[LRUG] Multi page form design gem for Rails?

[Stuart Harrison]

Cool, thanks all. That’s really useful. Given me a lot of food for thought.
I think I’m going to go down the route of using Wicked and having some DB
persistence, as well as using a form object to separate out the branching
and validation logic. This still feels like something that could be
standardised / gemified, as it’s a common problem, particularly in the
public sector (funnily enough, this is actually for some work I’m doing for
Hackney Council!). I will continue to mull, but this is super useful.

Cheers

Stu


On 14 February 2018 at 13:10:45, Murray Steele (murray.steele at gmail.com)
wrote:

I think the gov.uk app you’re talking about would be smart-answers (
https://github.com/alphagov/smart-answers).  This avoids most of the
problems by encoding all the answers in the url.  E.g. you start at
gov.uk/something and then advance through some questions until you get to
something like gov.uk/something/y/aberdeen/1000/dogs/n/n/2018/  which has
your outcome.  I reckon this is a reasonable approach if you can encode the
answers in the URL, and you’re not exposing any personally identifiable
information by doing so.

I’ve also used the approach Rob suggests of hiding all the previous state
in hidden fields in the form, and using some logic on the backend to work
out what the next step is.  Ultimately this means that your final step is a
standard rails create action with a big hash of params that you persist to
the db in an active record object.  I think this works ok, but it may
depend how complicated your step-by-step form is, and if there’s any
branching or whatever.  I didn’t use a gem for this, just rolled my own
thing.

The advantage of something like Wicked though is that you persist in the db
at various stages and can get some after-the-fact analytics on abandoned
sessions and how far through people get which might help you tweak the form
to simplify it.  Or you can also email people a week later to say “Hey, you
didn’t finish this thing, can we help / give you a discount / whatever”
which may be useful.

Cheers,

Murray



On 14 February 2018 at 12:12, Duncan Stuart <dgmstuart at gmail.com> wrote:

> I don’t know of a gem - it’s a recurring problem, and a fiddly one since
> the concept of state is different from standard Rails CRUD.
>
> We’ve used an approach of storing a hash of answers in the session:
> https://github.com/LBHackney-IT/maintain-my-home/blob/develop/app/models/
> selected_answer_store.rb, and elsewhere configuring the branching
> structure of a set of similar multiple-choice questions in YAML:
> https://github.com/LBHackney-IT/maintain-my-home/blob/develop/app/models/
> question_set.rb
>
> This approach was borrowed from some gov.uk site (I forget which but you
> can find it in the commit history). Iirc that project additionaly had an
> object responsible for deciding what the next question should be, based on
> the previous answers.
>
> Good luck!
>
> Duncan Stuart
>
> On Wed, 14 Feb 2018 at 09:17 Stuart Harrison <Stuart Harrison
> <Stuart+Harrison+%3Cpezholio at gmail.com%3E>> wrote:
>
>> Hey LRUG
>>
>> I’m about to embark on a project which has a couple of multi page
>> branched forms, and, as it’s a common problem, I’m wondering if something
>> exists that allows me to design a form either via a DSL or YAML, rather
>> than having to reinvent the wheel each time. I used Surveyor
>> <https://github.com/NUBIC/surveyor> a few years ago, which kinda worked
>> for me, but it did cause some pretty major headaches too, and now seems to
>> be largely abandoned. I like the look of Wicked
>> <https://github.com/schneems/wicked>, which gets me part of the way
>> there, but I don’t get that DSL-y way of designing the form and not having
>> to worry about building the individual form parts in a view. Is there
>> anything out there that supports this? Or are there any patterns that
>> anyone else uses that would help this?
>>
>> Hope this makes sense
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Stu
>>
>>
>
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