Preloading form data

I'm using the technique Ryan Bates illustrated in Railscasts Episode 197 s开发者_如何学JAVAo that the form can "grow" as the user adds more items to the form. That's all working great, but I need to call the page while supplying an initial item as a part of the URL.

Since Ryan's technique has the user click an Add button to invoke a jQuery function to add fields to the form, I'm a little stymied how to pass information from the controller to jQuery to invoke -- and prefill -- one of those new fields.

Am I thinking about this wrong?

Yes, you're thinking about it wrong ;-)

Take this form for example:

<% form_for @survey do |f| %>  
  <%= f.error_messages %>  
  <p>  
    <%= f.label :name %><br />  
    <%= f.text_field :name %>  
  </p>  
  <% f.fields_for :questions do |builder| %>  
    <%= render 'question_fields', :f => builder %>  
  <% end %>  
  <p><%= link_to_add_fields "Add Question", f, :questions %>  
  <p><%= f.submit "Submit" %></p>  
<% end %>

fields_for is an iterator; so all your controller has to do is:

@survey.questions.build(:content => "Prepared question")

and it will show up on the page.

Generate the text fields like you normally would, in the Rails view.