---
title: ActionView basics - list and edit custom video descriptions
slug: actionview-basics-list-and-edit-custom-video-descriptions
published_at: 2021-02-10 18:00:05 +0000
updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:29 +0000
summary: 
description: In this episode, we build on the previous work we did with the database and add views with simple ActionView templates with basic HTML and ERB for working with video, presenters, and templates.  Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/video_automation Twitter: https://twitter.com/cjav_dev Feedback: https://forms.gle/Q31hhjJGsMrvY4mL6  It turns out there's a really excellent tool called TubeBuddy that already exists and does most of what I was planning to build. I've started using TubeBuddy in the past few months and really like it. If you use this link to buy a license, I'll get a small cut for being an affiliate: https://www.tubebuddy.com/cjavdev. #rails #rubyonrails
tags: [ruby, rails, ruby on rails, ActionController, ActionView]
views: 1266
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/actionview-basics-list-and-edit-custom-video-descriptions
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JispE3mZtXg
youtube_id: JispE3mZtXg
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/JispE3mZtXg
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/JispE3mZtXg/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# ActionView basics - list and edit custom video descriptions

*Published: February 10, 2021*
*Views: 1266*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JispE3mZtXg)

[![ActionView basics - list and edit custom video descriptions](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/JispE3mZtXg/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JispE3mZtXg)

## Description

In this episode, we build on the previous work we did with the database and add views with simple ActionView templates with basic HTML and ERB for working with video, presenters, and templates.

Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/video_automation
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cjav_dev
Feedback: https://forms.gle/Q31hhjJGsMrvY4mL6

It turns out there's a really excellent tool called TubeBuddy that already exists and does most of what I was planning to build. I've started using TubeBuddy in the past few months and really like it. If you use this link to buy a license, I'll get a small cut for being an affiliate: https://www.tubebuddy.com/cjavdev.
#rails #rubyonrails

## Transcript

so that they have like the correct associations before i do that though i'm going to add the gem annotate to my gem file because i like having comments in the model files that show me the annotations um i actually forget how this works annotate gem rail do i have to say rake annotate something something annotate models rails g annotate install hmm uh annotate dash dash models is that going to work no what is the error here oh um bundle exec annotate models cool all right so let's go set up all of our models so we're going to go in app models and we have several here so we'll start in a in a video so video um belongs to a description template go file oh no my rails rails vim isn't working okay description template uh has many videos and a video okay let's see presenter belongs to video belongs to presenter great and then a video has many presenters and has many or has many video presenters and then has many presenters through video presenters okay and then a presenter belongs to wait no sorry a video a presenter has many uh video presenters and has many videos through uh video presenters that hurt my brain a little bit uh video resource belongs to a video a video has many uh video resources and okay so we should be able to like mess around with videos and presenters and such and we've got our description template and that's related okay so what i think might make sense now is to my first inclination is to make like a list view of all the videos and then a detail view and some edit and show views where you can edit the videos um so we will do that next all right so in order to make some views or for working with the controllers for these i'm going to say rails g controller rails g controller videos and we're going to have index we'll have show we will have edit and that's probably good so that by passing index show and edit that'll create the index show and edit templates for me it also puts stuff in routes but i'm going to delete those like almost immediately so resources videos and we'll go to the videos controller also at this point there's no like authentication or anything because i haven't like bit off the part about having multiple users and teams and collaborators and such this is really just kind of like a thing to manage my own personal videos initially but theoretically you could add that stuff on later so at videos is equal to video dot all and we'll just show that at video is equal to video dot find params id and then edit will be this same thing okay so if we were to fire this up now um whoops okay i have to set my local node end and then run webpack or install because my default local node end is uh or my default node environment is version 10.16 which isn't supported by all the fancy new rails webpacker stuff that's in 6.1 so i always have to like set the local version of node end when i fire this up okay so we will make a list view where we can see all of the videos and then we will make a show view and then we will make an edit view and that really won't be super interesting until we actually have videos so we might want to make a seed file so we can do let's let's see if we can actually fire it up first okay looks like that's working let's see localhost 3000 slash videos and it is loading cool so we got a videos index here um all right so in the db directory there's this c.rb file where we can we can create uh seed data so first thing we want to do is probably create a video or i don't know let's see video is equal to video dot find or create no let's just say video dot creature creeping youtube id is seed title is test video tags is going to be like a b c uh chapter markers will be um start okay and then description template is going to be description or let's say template and then we'll create that first template is equal to description template and what does that look like description template it has a template and we'll just say like test okay and then what else do we have here we have a presenter so say presenter is equal to presenter.create and they have a name tony stark and they have a twitter handle it's probably tony or the real tony stark tony stark uh let's see uh linked in might be something like uh i don't know roll is like super hero and that's it okay so we've got our presenter um actually we need we probably need like two presenter uh let's see tony and i don't know steve minecraft steve steve steve steve uh minecrafter okay so our video presenters um they are going to have the video id um so we're going to say uh i think i can actually say like uh present is equal to tony and steve i think that might work with active record video because it has many presenters um so that should i think that should work and it will create the two video presenter objects for us i might need to pass like presenter underscore ids and pass like tony id and steve.id but um i think this might work so we've got our we've got some stuff here in practice i would probably write some tests yeah i should probably write some tests and then use like factory bot to generate these objects but for now this should do so i can say rake db seed and this should create those objects we'll see if anything fails okay no output let's uh rails console to fire up the rails console and see if the objects actually got made video dot account cool video dot last um okay so l.presenters.pluck twitter handle so just give me the twitter handles it looks like it's working so all right let's go build out some ui that'll show us a list of stuff okay so video index all right so here i'm just going to say like videos we'll remove that and then here i'm going to keep it super simple it's just going to be a ul uh and with a list of videos so at videos.each do video and we'll just say li video dot title um let's say link to i can never remember the pattern for the link to method if it's the name of the link or the thing you're linking to first it drives me crazy all right so test video we click on it goes to show that's super cool application let's see let's go to routes and add a root route that just goes to the video index videos index okay so if we go to the root route that doesn't have slash videos we'll land here and then in our application html in our application html erb this is like our layout file we'll just add a a link that goes back to the route that just says like home or something keeping it real simple real simple here all right so if we click on home drops us back here we click test video we should now let's like add the the show page so you can see the details of a video so we'll go to videoshow.html.erb and here at the top rather than that we'll put in the at video.title remember that we set this at video instance variable in the videos controller and so just because we set the instance variable here and now we're in show.html.erb here we're able to access this video instance variable and we're looking up the video using params id so we're taking this id 1 out of the out of the path and we're passing that into the active record model find method which is going to search the database find the video deserial or serialize it into a video object and then store it in this instance variable which we can then access from the show page over here so that's kind of how that fits together so let's recall what a video has on it again so let's just say like video dot youtube id and title tags we can clean this up later chapter markers and description template.template and refresh the page and we've got all of our stuff here so that's pretty cool and we can go back we can go to test video so we're able to like see stuff about the video what i think would be a cool first step would be to embed this thing so how does this work we can say share embed and copy this thing and then come back over here and at the very bottom we'll just paste in that embed code and then let's let's see here how does this work um okay so this is going to be youtube.com and i think this is the youtube id uh video dot youtube id and then we've got this uh frame border zero um allow accelerometer really accelerometer how does that even how is that useful uh for watching youtube uh okay so let's see so we're gonna come back to our page here and we've got is we've got something embedded right i think it's failing to embed because seed is not a legit name or none not a legit id for a video so let's go let's go back to our seed file and let's change the id of our video from seed to an actual youtube video id and we'll say rake db drop db create db migrate and before i run that i got to kill the database so this is going to like delete all the data and then re-migrate and then recreate the data and then we should be able to restart the server and our one seed video should have some an actual video here oh can't find video with id1 did it not actually run it let's see um oh i didn't say seed so dbc so you can like chain all these on kind of like the order that you want them to run okay we've got a test video click on it hey look at that it's embedded so that is super cool we can see the id to the video here that's great and we have the title and tags and some other stuff so the next thing we want to do is make it so that we can edit the title the tags and the chapter markers so let's make a view here we can go to like slash edit and let's make a link on the on the show page so before we go too far let's add a link to um edit and it'll be like edit video path for at video i think and let's refresh and there's no edit link there and it brings us to the edit view if we go back cool so now let's go implement our super simple form so the edit view is here we're going to say let's say edit and then we'll put in the name or the title of the video it's gonna be super dumb crud right like we don't actually need to have the title update as we're typing with angular or react or anything we can just keep it simple right okay so we're gonna have a form action that's gonna post back to at video no let's see let's see video path for at video and the method is going to be post but we need a hidden input with um the name underscore method because we want to make this a post request so the value of this is going to be put so by including this hidden input field with underscore method this is how rails knows that we're simulating a put request because browsers don't actually know how to do put requests super weird they can do post and get but they can't do put with just like old school forms so we simulate it and our web our web framework knows what we're talking about if we include this this hidden thing it's not common across all web frameworks but it's it's fine uh okay so the other thing is that like this edit form is not actually going to submit the data or like it's not going to like make the update to the api we're going to have like a separate thing that updates to the api right this is just going to update our internal reference or internal representation of the video so what what things did we want uh video gonna pull this back up so we want um we're not gonna change the youtube id so we're not gonna allow editing that but we will allow editing the title so we're going to have a label let's actually make it like a div with a label and we'll say title and i'm going to put a 4 title this 4 tag is important because it allows you to like click on the word title and give focus to the related input the way that this matches is by the id so i'm actually going to use this pattern where you pass in video title like this to namespace the params that we're passing back to the controller the id is going to be title and the value is going to be at video.title the existing title right okay so let's make another div here and this is going to be for let's just make it chapter markers label i label i thought i had like another shortcut for this apparently not um okay so this is going to be chapter markers and okay input this is going to be tech or let's let's make a text area because working with chapter markers you kind of want to like you want to have multiple lines so the name here is going to be video chapter markers the id is going to be chapter markers most videos have about eight chapter markers i would say uh it kind of depends and then the content here is gonna be at video.chapter markers one thing i've run into is if you put like if you put new lines around this um when you're building out the form it adds like space inside of the content of the text area so uh just something to look out for it's kind of kind of an odd kind of an odd thing um all right this looks like garbage but it seems like it might work maybe uh we've got a title we've got chapter markers what else do we have we have tags so div label tags um tags uh so how do we want to do the tags we probably want some sort of ui like select two i don't know if that's actually like what the new what the cool kids are doing these days why don't we just make it a comma separated list so we'll just say input is a text and we'll say the name is video tags and the id is tags and the value is at video.tags dot join comma let's see okay so tags and then we can just say like a comma separated and we can deal with that in the controller we'll just keep it easy keep it easy uh what else do we want we want so we've got the title tags chapter markers etc etc okay we also want to be able to add a presenter and select a description template so description template input is going to be actually no it's not going to be an input it's going to be a select box right select and the name is going to be video description template id and then we want to auto populate the options that are available for a description template by iterating over all possible description templates so we want to do something like at description templates dot each do template okay and then we'll create options for each of those value is going to be template.id and the the content that you see is going to be the template oh we need to give a name to our templates uh that name okay so rails g migration add name to description templates name okay add name to description template and that looks good rake actually let's make it a null false and then we'll go to our seed file and say name nest template rake db migrate db actually make yeah let's drop let's drop the whole database and re-migrate and everything uh db create or okay so the reason why i want to do that is because we're going to add a nullable we're adding a non-nullable field to a database which already has null fields in it let's see oh i got to kill the server okay we need create db create drop it create it migrate it seed it it's like that uh that song twist it pop it it's like yeah bop it the bopic game alright so let's see what we got here nothing no servers running refresh the page okay let's see oh add description templates is not defined right because i just iterated over a list of things that isn't actually here so in our videos controller we need to create an instance variable for the description templates that we're going to support so for the edit view we want to say like at description templates is equal to description template.all for now refresh the page we've got a test template here here's the video here's the start okay so that's looking cool um we should probably also add some way to add a presenter right so we're actually gonna need like the whole entire thing for a presenter so should we do rails g controller presenters uh uh let's just say new that allows to create a new presenter and then we probably won't edit also sure okay so presenters controller we will want def create um def update okay and then our routes here will have resources presenters okay so a new presenter is going to be like at presenter equals presenter.new create or actually yeah let's go go to the new form so presenter new let's see add a presenter so this is going to be a post request to presenters to create a new presenter and what do they have they've got a name so div label name name input is going to be text the name is going to be presenter name and the id is going to be name and the value is going to be at presenter.name the reason i do that is if for some reason submission fails we're going to re-render this presenter new form and we want that to be pre-populated so they don't lose the context actually let's see this is going to say like add or like create or something okay so we want to also support adding the twitter handle okay and linkedin so i i used find and replace for the twitter handle one but not the name one because name always bites me because we have a prop also named name um so uh yeah let's see uh linked in let's it's a roll g oh cool and this becomes roll and this becomes linked in all right um so i'm actually thinking that we want to like use this in a partial here and then what we can do is say if at presenter dot persisted or like if the presenter is persisted then we want to set some like action uh equal to um the so if if they're persisted they're in the database and we are on the edit view if we're on the edit view then we want to send a put request to slash slash presenter slash id of the presenter so presenter path at presenter otherwise we wanted to just go to the presenter presenters path okay so that's going to be our form action that's like where we're sending the post request to sorry if that's not super clear and then inside of the form if it's a put request we need to make sure that we add that hidden input i talked about earlier so if presenter.persisted then we're going to put the hidden input and its name again is a method and its value is put only if it's persisted though right like if it's new we don't want to put requests we want a post request because post creates and put updates sorta depends on who you talk to and then here we're going to say like render form i think i haven't worked with partials in a super long time so let's see okay so if we go to like uh let's see presenter slash new then something exploded encountered a syntax error while rendering the template action equals presenter persisted then oh you know what i need two question marks here this is this is stripped me up before uh so that is uh we're using a ternary okay so we've got a name twitter handle linkedin role so if we just like if we just like typed stuff in and click create nothing's going to happen because our our post endpoint or like uh we're sending post requests to presenters but like not getting any data back right now right because our presenter's controller doesn't do anything so in create we want to say we want to create a new presenter object at presenter equals presenter.new we're going to pass in presenter params this is like really conventional private um so this is for like when working with strong parameters we you don't want to allow from your front end to pass in just like whatever they want so you want to sanitize or require restrict what you're passing down into active records so that they don't so that users can't mess with your database and such as easily so we're going to say params.require presenter and so when i say require presenter this is talking about like this key here so we're going to we're going to be passing these in form encoded or like whatever application xxx form url encoded data and so when we say params.requirepresenter we're saying that like first of all only look at the params who who start with this presenter thing and then key into them with name twitter handle linkedin and role so then we can say require presenter and then permit these like name twitter handle linkedin and roll so that'll only allow those four so that's that's good so here we're using new instead of create that will build an instance but it will not actually persist it to the database and the pattern that we use in the controller is first we new up an instance and then we say if presenter dot save which when you don't pass a bang this will return true or false whether or not it was able to persist if it was not able to persist if for some reason it failed persisting then this special like errors object on the presenter will be populated with some data so we're going to say flash dot now errors is equal to at presenter dot errors dot full messages and then we're going to render new so in every controller action you must either render or redirect and you can only do one so if we were able to save the presenter then let's what do we want to do like you might go to the presenters show page or the list of presenters or i don't actually know let's let's just say render json of the presenter because i'm not quite sure we don't really have an index yeah sure let's let's redirect to an index redirect to presenter's path um okay and then we need an index here at presenters is presenter to all so uh presenter show or this this thing needs a index.html index.html.erb and it's actually going to be like basically the same thing as the video index but instead of videos it's going to be presenters video center g okay and then we're gonna like yeah link to uh sure all right so test create was a post request cool we got back here we see our presenters tony stark steve and test we can actually just like make this a little bit nicer instead of linking to we'll just print out their name and we'll print out their twitter handle and their what is it linked in and their role oh you know what shoot okay whatever the the role is the role they're like job title but not their role in the video okay so this is fine this is cool uh and then let's just let's just add an edit link uh link to edit and that's gonna go to edit presenter path at presenter when you pass in the instance variable like that it's actually trying to find what parameter is used for the the path and in most cases the default is just to pull the id off the instance variable but if you went if you changed that in the future and you wanted to use some other some other thing then you could you could do that so here i pass in an instance variable but we're looping over so we don't we have a local variable not an instance variable all right so we wanted to edit test we to come here and edit let's okay so let's go to our um our presenter edit form which now we should just be able to like say edit and then at presenter.name and then just like render uh render form and that should just kind of work i think maybe no uh for nil class presenters controller ah we haven't implemented anything at presenter equals presenter.fine params id and then update is going to be similar to create but instead of calling save we'll call update if uh at presenter.update with presenter params so sometimes you want like different params um for update and create in this case we want to be able to update everything so it's fine so if it's successful we'll redirect to presenters path otherwise we're going to say flash.now is errors at presenter.errors.full messages and then render edit we'll render the edit back okay so all right so here's our edit form if we went back or let's let's go to slash presenters um so these ones are pretty more like more full featured right steve his twitter handle is steve he's a minecrafter maybe he changes his name to an illager oh and then we want to change the button on the form presenter form so if it's persisted then we want it to be one thing if it's not persisted we want it to be another thing so if it's persisted it should be update okay also this is like pretty darn close to what uh the if you use rails g scaffold like what happens but by building it out yourself you can kind of think a little bit more carefully about how this stuff is coming out so yeah that worked now we have illidger we've got this edit button it totally updates stevie and let's say stevie change his name to stevie everywhere stevie okay update also again this like totally looks like garbage but we'll go back and style it later so we've got our presenters the whole reason why we wanted to do our presenters was so that we could edit our video here and when we edit the video we can add presenters to our video so let's do that now okay so this is great because i feel like we're running into a bunch of interesting stuff like dealing with tags and presenters and kind of like related objects so so let's update our edit test video form so that it supports passing in or like supports passing which presenters were in the video so video form videos uh edit okay and maybe down here we'll have a div and we probably want how does this work okay we are going to want a list of video presenter ids so we're going to pass in like video video or like presenter ids and then we want to pass like um this and this so we want to have like several of these which um so there's a couple ways we could do this if we had tons and tons of presenters then we would probably want to make this so that you can like search for the presenter and select them you might also want a way to say like just at mention the presenter or something like you could build a really interesting ui for the videos that i'm making it's it's like me it's uh one or two of my kids and maybe some guests and maybe like a couple other folks so the list of presenters is not going to be that long so the way that i'm actually going to solve this for now is going to be a check box list and my reason is that i don't expect my list of presenters to grow beyond like a dozen if you have more than that then you probably want a different interface for this but this will both keep it super simple and um yeah it'll keep it easy so we'll have a let's see how does a checkbox list work well we want to have an input type checkbox and the name is going to be video presenter ids and the reason it has this extra little thing at the end is because we're going to pass in an array and the array is going to be populated with all the values that we are passing in in this case what i want to do is uh pass in or i want to like iterate over all of the presenters and then create checkboxes for each of the presenters and also labels for each of the presenters so we want to label here and this is going to be like the presenter.name right and then this is going to be presenter.id and then we actually need like the list of presenters so i'm going to say at presenters.each do presenter so we're going to loop over all the presenters and for each presenter we're going to generate these two html elements now in order to get the four working we need to target this unique id so to create a unique id here what i might do is just say like presenter dash and then put in their id presenter.id just so that it's unique and then i want to use the same exact thing in my for prop on the label so if we come back over here app presenters isn't defined so videos controller in the edit action i also need at presenters is presenter to all okay so now we see tony stark test and stevie what's cool is that the uh if we if we inspect this right we see that it has now presenter dash and the id presenter dash and the id so if we if we check these boxes and then say update video well right now we don't have an update method but this would send a put request it would pass if these two are checked if these two values are checked then it would pass the values just the values that are checked right so in this case it would pass test which is 3 and it would pass 2 for for stevie but it would not pass 1 because tony stark is not checked so that we'll look at that a little bit more in a second but first we need to add an update controller action similar to the presenter controller action we're going to say like at video is video dot find params id and we're going to say if at video.update video params then redirect to at video we can just say at video if we're going to the show page which is pretty handy um else and so flash.now errors video dot errors.full messages so we haven't actually added any active record validations either which we can do in a moment okay render edit def or let's say private say def video params params.require video dot um permit and then we want the whole list of things that we're going to be passing in from the front end which i think we're getting pretty close to this stuff so title tags uh chapter markers so tags because the name of the column is the same but i didn't make it an array we're gonna have to mess around with that a little bit uh and i have some ideas like maybe we can update the setter method on the video object to like split on array or something fancy i don't know we'll have to get into it chapter markers um the description template id and uh presenter ids so for presenter ids recall that we're passing in um an array and so in that case you actually have to go you have to specify it like this where you say presenter ids is the symbol pointing at empty array that that tells strong parameters that we expect it to be an array that's coming in so um anything else that we got on the client i don't know let's just refresh and see what happens um edit and okay so if we check these two oh so okay so those those were not checked but i bet if we look in the database let's see here so in the logs we see this come in as presenter ids three and two and unpermitted parameters description id title chapter markers presenter ids huh why that's interesting oh that was probably the first one maybe get videos get videos i don't know let's let's uh rails c and we're looking at video one so video dot find one um dot presenters okay so yeah it found the presenters dot pluck id one and two oh that's that's wrong that's wrong okay so um all right so what's what's up here what's up here video presenter ids video edit form so before we go too far let's uh let's add the um checked checked so we want to we want to print out the property checked if at video.presenter ids include the presenter.id so we want to we want to print that out so that it will actually render that property if it's checked okay so so it is checked for one and two so if we uncheck tony stark and we say update and then we say edit okay only stevia is checked if we check test and say update and then click edit okay so test and stevie so there's one other thing that we have to do and that is handle when all are unchecked because i don't think that's handled yet right so if we uncheck all of them and say update it's not actually unchecking them and that is because when you when you update and you pass nothing we need to be explicit about passing no ids right um so we can do that by adding a hidden input that has the same um doesn't have to be inside the list the type is hidden the name is the same and then the value is going to be just um false i think let's see maybe false or f maybe and we don't need this thing because we don't need to be checked ever all right so if we uncheck both and then click update oops let's see record not found parameter with id okay so how to how to remove checkbox or like how to clear check boxes with rails yeah so there's gonna there's like some fancy no it's not fancy but let's see i thought it was uh passing and empty okay what that's interesting okay whatever that's fine so it's implemented in that case it's implemented in the controller so videos controller down here they say like params video presenter ids or equals empty array so that if no if nothing was passed then it will have something set for you and we need to go back and we need to refresh the page uncheck these click update and then if we click edit again nothing should be checked cool so that totally works and i'm a little surprised but it is what it is okay so that totally works we're able to update our videos all right in the next section what i want to do is build out the description template so we will do that next

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