User input

Creating a form

We create a view which displays a form to the user.

<!-- bleets/new.html -->
<form action="/bleets" method="POST">
  <label for="userId">User ID</label>
  <input type="number" name="userId" id="userId" />

  <label for="content">Content</label>
  <textarea name="content" id="content"></textarea>

  <button type="submit">Bleet it!</button>
</form>

INFO

The name attribute of the inputs determines the key once the form data is parsed on the server. This form would result in keys of userId and content.

Rendering the form

We need to create a controller which renders the form for the user to complete.

// BleetController.java
public static void renderForm(Context ctx) {
  ctx.render("bleets/new.html");
}

Handling the post request

The form submits a POST request to the /bleets endpoint. We must create a handler for this:

// BleetController.java
public static void handleForm(Context ctx) throws Exception {
  // get the userId
  int userId = ctx.formParamAsClass("userId", Integer.class).get();

  // get and validate the content
  String content = ctx.formParamAsClass("content", String.class)
      .check(data -> data.length() < 140, "Content must be less than 140 characters")
      .get();

  // create the bleet
  BleetRepository.create(userId, content);

  // redirect
  ctx.status(201);
  ctx.redirect("/bleets");
}

The ctx.redirect('/bleets') sends to browser to the /bleets page on successful submission.