Ruby on Rails Country/State Select Enigma

Question

I am trying to implement something seemingly very simple, and I have been beating my head against it for days at this point.

My desired end result is a Country select drop-down, tied to a State select drop-down, in such a way that when a given country is selected, IF states are known THEN those states are displayed in a select drop down, and if NO states are known for that country, then a text field is displayed instead.

I feel like I am almost there. At this point the interface will actually generate that list of states based on the persons' country, except it is refusing to update the drop-down dynamically.

The portion of my view where country and state location is gathered looks like:

# _person_setup.html.erb
         <td>
        <%= f.label :country, 'Select your country' %>*<br />
        <%= f.select :country, Carmen::country_names, {}, 
          {:style => 'width: 200px', 
          :id => 'country_select',
          :onchange => remote_function(
            :url => {:action => 'update_states'},
            :with => "'country='+value")} %>            
      </td><td>
        <p>
        <div id="states_div">
            <%= render :partial => 'states', 
                :object => Carmen::states(
                            Carmen::country_code(
                              @person.country)),
                :locals => {:form => f} %>
       </div>
        </p>            
      </td>    

The partial being referenced in the DIV is as follows:

 # _states.html.erb
<% unless states.nil? or states.empty? %>
    <%= form.label :state, 'Select your state' %>*<br />
    <%= form.select :state, states.collect{|s| [s[0], s[0]]} %>
<% else %>
    <%= form.label :state, 'Please enter state or province' %>*<br />
    <%= form.text_field :state %>
<% end %>

Finally, the controller code which is intended to update the list of states dynamically:

def update_states    
puts "Attempting to update states..."    
q = params[:country]    
states = Carmen::states(Carmen::country_code(q))
puts "Country = #{q}, states = #{states.collect{|s| s[0]}.join(", ")}."
render :update do |page|
    page.replace_html "states_div", 
      :partial => 'states',
      :object => states,
      :locals => {:form => form_for(@person)}
end
puts "OK"
end

Now, this code is being called at the proper time and generating the appropriate lists of states. For example, when the user clicks Australia, "Attempting to update states... Country = Australia, states = Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, Northern Territory, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, Western Australia" shows up in the server process. However it doesn't update the page, and won't print the "OK" at the end. In short the line which is failing is undoubtedly

page.replace_html "states_div", 
      :partial => 'states',
      :object => states,
      :locals => {:form => form_for(@person)}

Note that replacing this line with

page.replace_html 'states_div', "<b>is it working</b>" 

properly replaces the div, but of course not with anything useful.

Can someone help me understand what is going on here?

Answer 1

Ryan Bates has a Railscast that shows how to select a category for a product or create a new category by typing the name. It sounds like a similar scenario to what you have, so you might want to check it out: Create Model Through Text Field.