On Rails 4. I have three Models (for this question): Users, Organizations, and UserOrganizations. Users can have many organizations, and organizations can have many users. This relationship is stored in UserOrganizations with user_id and organization_id. So, UserOrganizations belongs to users and organizations.
When I want to add a new user/organization relationship, the user_id is automatically taken from the current user logged in. However, to assign that user to an organization, I have a dropdown select, listing all the organizations in the database (by name).
This is fine in the dev environment but not so great when I will eventually have over a thousand organizations.
What I would like to do is have a sort of text look-up input where the user can type in an organization's name and then all orgs in the database containing that name will display. Then the user can select the name (through a radio button maybe?) to tell the app which org he/she would like to be assigned. Ideally, this would happen on the same page/no reload.
What is the best way to create this form? Is there a gem or something else that exists to easily make this? Can you do this with formtastic or even without a gem? Thank you for any help.
You should probably take a look to rails3-jquery-autocomplete gem. It has quite documentation and examples. More or less:
Model:
class UserOrganization < ActiveRecord::Base
attr_accessor :organization_name
end
Controller:
class UserOrganizationsController < Admin::BaseController
autocomplete :organization, :name
end
Routes:
resources :user_organizations do
get :autocomplete_organization_name, :on => :collection
end
View:
form_for(@user_organization) do |f|
f.hidden_field :organization_id, id: 'org_id'
f.autocomplete_field :organization_name, autocomplete_organization_name_user_organizations_path, id_element: '#org_id'
end
It also provides integration with SimpleForm and Formtastic.