Rails issue with params hash

Question

I need to export a previously rendered table from my view to pdf. When I build the array of hashes as follows:

__index = 0

@people.each do |p| %>
  @pdfdata[__index] = {                                
    [:name] => p.name.to_s,                         
    [:surname] => p.surname.to_s
    __index += 1
  end
end 

and send it to the controller in order to export it on a pdf as follows:

hidden_field_tag(:pdfdata, @pdfdata)

when I get the params[:pdfdata] I cannot find a way unless I build a string parser to map the data accordingly... is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

Modifying your code a little bit to get

 @people.each_with_index do |p,i| %>
   @pdfdata[i] = {                                
    [:name] => p.name.to_s,                         
    [:surname] => p.surname.to_s}
  end 

and use this gem to create the hidden has field

https://github.com/brianhempel/hash_to_hidden_fields