[LRUG] Multi page form design gem for Rails?

[Duncan Stuart]

Hi Murray - I looked it up: it was the gov.uk Verify frontend:
https://github.com/alphagov/verify-frontend

Answers are stored in the session, not the URL:
https://github.com/alphagov/verify-frontend/blob/d3e1444ce7658bce353f85b2ece4d101666be3ef/app/models/selected_answer_store.rb

In their case the forms are all very small and they seem to do any required
validation in the controller. We took the same approach as Andrew and had
individual form objects for each page.

Cheers

Duncan

On 14 February 2018 at 13:10, 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/bl
>> ob/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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