Multiple Select Dropdown and Storing Problem

[Jim]

I was working on this a couple of months back and could not figure
out
what I was doing wrong. I came back to it today and wanted to post
again to see if any of you had an idea. Here is the problem.

I have this code:


<select name="myrep[RepFor][]" size="3" multiple="multiple">
<%= options_from_collection_for_select(@rflists, "id", "keyword",
@selected) %>
</select>


The field I am storing is called RepFor in the myrep table. The
options for the dropdown comes from a keyword table that have an id
and name. The options I want have been fed into rflists. This all
works good and displays properly with a multiple select dropdown with
the proper names and values. Here is the html it renders:


<select name="myrep[RepFor][]" size="3" multiple="multiple">
<option value="1808">Car Insurance</option>
<option value="1809">Home Insurance</option>
<option value="1810">Technology</option>
<option value="1811">Accounting</option>
<option value="1812">Legal</option>


So if I select Car Insurance, Home Insurance and Technology and
submit
it this is what gets written to the DB. Exactly as shown below.


--- - "1808" - "1809" - "1810"


When I reopen the form nothing is selected.


Now if I manually set @selected in my code as follows it selects the
items I have forced when I reopen the form:


<% @selected = 1808, 1809, 1810 %>
<select name="myrep[RepFor][]" size="3" multiple="multiple">
<%= options_from_collection_for_select(@rflists, "id", "keyword",
@selected) %>
</select>


My question is what do I need to do to make the select write the data
to the DB the same way I set it in @selected. Is there something
that
has to be done in the controller to keep it from being written as
follows:


--- - "1808" - "1809" - "1810"


or do I need to do something special when reading it back?


Thanks for your help.


Jim

 

[Phrogz]

I was working on this a couple of months back and could not figure
out
what I was doing wrong. I came back to it today and wanted to post
again to see if any of you had an idea. Here is the problem.

....this looks like a Ruby on Rails question. You may have better
success asking this question on the Ruby on Rails group, rather than
the (general language) Ruby mailing list/newsgroup/forum beast.

http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk

 

[Brian Candler]

So if I select Car Insurance, Home Insurance and Technology and
submit
it this is what gets written to the DB. Exactly as shown below.


--- - "1808" - "1809" - "1810"

That looks like YAML, but with some of the whitespace trimmed out.

irb(main):001:0> require 'yaml'
=> true
irb(main):002:0> YAML.load(%{--- - "1808" - "1809" - "1810"})
ArgumentError: syntax error on line 0, col 13: `--- - "1808" - "1809" - "1810"'
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/yaml.rb:133:in `load'
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/yaml.rb:133:in `load'
from (irb):2
irb(main):003:0> YAML.load(%{---\n - "1808"\n - "1809"\n - "1810"})
=> ["1808", "1809", "1810"]

Note that what you're trying to do is to put a quart into a pint pot - i.e.
write a ruby Array into a single field in the database.