Using jquery TokenInput without default 'name'

Question

Im trying to use the jquery tokeninput found here: http://loopj.com/jquery-tokeninput/ Following the guide from railcasts: http://railscasts.com/episodes/258-token-fields

By default, it required a 'name' column on the table/json..

Any way to customize to change it to something else (in my case, 'account_number')?

(in the reailcast, he says if you dont have a 'name' column, youll require extra customization)

Answer 1

The magical lines are

<%= f.text_field :author_tokens, "data-pre" => @book.authors.map(&:attributes).to_json %>

and

format.json { render :json => @authors.map(&:attributes) }

These lines convert the data read from table into the json which jquery-tokeninput can understand. It passes on all the data from the model into, jquery-tokeninput, but it is not necessary. Tokeninput, only needs two fields,

1. id -> for each selected token, this is posted along with form
2. name -> used as label of the token

If you don't want to have a name field in your model, and want to use account_number as the label, you can do it like following:

<%= f.text_field :author_tokens, "data-pre" => @book.authors.collect {|author| {:id => author.id, :name => author.account_number } } %>

and

format.json { render :json => @authors.collect {|author| {:id => author.id, :name => author.account_number } }

Basically, change the json passed to tokeninput. Pass accoun_number as name.

Update:

Change this line to something which better suits you:

@authors = Author.where("name like ?", "%#{params[:q]}%")

One suggestion may be:

@authors = Author.where("name like ?", "#{params[:q]}%")

Remove the first %, but really depends on your data type and all.