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Rails Routes and Resources

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Controller Action for New Pages

1:48 with Jay McGavren

We're trying to set up an HTML form for new Page objects. We've defined a route for the /pages/new path that directs to the new method on PagesController. Now we just need to define that method.

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    We're trying to set up an HTML form for new page objects. 0:00
    We've defined a route for 0:04
    the /pages/new path that directs to the new method on PagesController. 0:05
    Now we just need to define that method. 0:11
    So we'll visit our pages controller in our editor and 0:13
    add a new method here at the bottom. 0:16
    The first thing the method needs to do is create a new blank page object and 0:21
    assign it to an instance variable that we'll use when we create our form. 0:25
    When we edit our view in a moment, 0:30
    we're going to call a method named form_for to setup the HTML form. 0:32
    form_for takes a model object, looks at its attributes, and 0:36
    uses those attributes to pre populate the form's fields. 0:40
    Now this might not seem like something we want since this is a form for 0:43
    a new object. 0:46
    In this case all of the form fields need to be blank. 0:47
    But that's okay, we'll just create a new model object. 0:50
    All of its attributes will default to nil. 0:53
    When form_for looks at the attributes it will just set the form's fields to blank 0:56
    values. 1:00
    Why go to all this trouble? 1:01
    For one thing we might someday want to set default to attribute values, 1:03
    even on a new model object. 1:06
    In that case we can just set the object attributes and 1:09
    the form fields will be set the same way. 1:11
    Also setting the form up this way will allow us to reuse the same form code for 1:14
    both creating new objects and editing existing objects. 1:18
    We'll see how that works later in the course. 1:22
    So we need a page object with empty attributes to be accessible within our 1:24
    view to base our form off of. 1:28
    As always, we make an object accessible within our 1:30
    view by assigning it to an instance variable, 1:33
    and we get a page object with empty attributes by calling Page.new. 1:35
    Be sure to save that when you're done. 1:41
    Next, we'll use that new object in a view to create an empty form. 1:44

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