Having problems with a custom account creation form in Rails

[vitaly-pushkar]

Hi, so I've been fighting this problem with Rodauth for a few hours now, and I would like to get some suggestions from more experienced Rodauth users out there.

I need a separate, multi-step form for my app's Author's (differs from a normal User by a few additional fields).
For that, I created a custom RodauthController with a create-author-account action and a view with my custom form.

In order to keep it simple (or so I though initially), I point this custom Author form action to the default Rodauth create account path (rodauth.create_account_path).

And then, in the RodauthMain in before_create_account and after_create_account I handle the difference between these two types of users, and forms, accordingly.

Despite this being maybe a little bit ugly from the code design perspective - it works for me. For the happy path, that is.

The problem starts when the Author form is invalid upon submission. It re-renders the original Rodauth account creation form, which is designed for sign up for regular User in my app. It doesn't re-render the Author custom form with the errors. And why would it? It does know nothing about it.

How do I make this work, though? Should I keep the current design and somehow manipulate Rodauth to re-render my Author custom form if there are errors? How can I do it?

Or should I approach it differently? How then?

Thank you a lot for your suggestions!

[janko]

Given that you're submitting them to the same Rodauth action, I would recommend using the same form template for Authors and Users, but generating different fields based on a query parameter.

For example, you could generate link rodauth.create_account_path(type: "author"), and then in your view template have if params[:type] == "author" conditionals, and also add form.hidden_field :type, value: params[:type] to persist the param across form redisplays.

[vitaly-pushkar]

This is a sensible approach, thank you, Janko!
I wanted to have separate routes for each sign up form, and therefore dismissed it initially.
But I think I can work around that.

Thank you!