Modifying the Edit Request

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Everything we added so far lets us view our goals on the web portal, but what if we want to edit them too? This requires us to modify another pair of web requests.

Edit Request

The edit request is used when someone wants to edit a character’s profile. It supplies the data for editing, which is subtly different from the data for viewing. In particular, we use a different helper when formatting markdown data for input instead of output. This helper converts %R’s to linebreaks, but leaves ansi codes alone.

Edit aresmush/plugins/profile/custom_char_fields.rb and modify the get_fields_for_editing method.

  def self.get_fields_for_editing(char, viewer)
    return { goals: Website.format_input_for_html(char.goals) }
  end

Edit Save Request

There’s a separate web request when the user clicks the ‘save’ button on the web portal. This handler does the actual updating of the character data. We can use yet another helper method to format our input for MUSH. This converts line breaks back into %r’s and does a few other things to make the website entry suitable for storage.

Edit aresmush/plugins/profile/custom_char_fields.rb and modify the save_fields_from_profile_edit method.

  def self.save_fields_from_profile_edit(char, char_data)
    char.update(goals: Website.format_input_for_mush(char_data[:custom][:goals]))
  end

Tip
Though it’s not covered by this tutorial, note that the web request handlers calling these code hooks check things like whether the user is logged in and has access to edit the character. Always be sure to check permissions in your web requests.

Testing All Our Changes

Now that we have everything wired up, we can test it out!

The easiest way to test web changes is to run the website in debug mode. This spins up a second copy of the website on a different port for testing. The advantage is that changes to the web code will be immediately loaded without needing to wait for a deploy, and without potentially messing up your main site.

But if you don’t want to deal with that, you can just use the website/deploy in-game, or the “Redeploy Website” button on the web portal (under Admin->Manage) to deploy your changes to your real web portal.

This article is part of the Modifying the Web Portal tutorial.