Custom Form Handling With Turbo
Turbo will be a default part of Rails from Rails 7, replacing Turbolinks and rails-ujs. This post is a result of time I spent digging into Turbo, in particular its implications for forms that don’t seem to fit what Turbo is designed for: that is, forms that don’t necessarily (or only) trigger a redirect or DOM changes. I don’t have a definitive answer for what we should do in these cases, but I’ll explain some options that might be useful if or when Turbo’s constraints feel a bit awkward.
Turbo Drive is the bit that intercepts link clicks and form submissions to avoid full page reloads. It’s the new incarnation of Turbolinks, which has been a default part of Rails apps for a long time. Turbolinks only intercepted link clicks, not form submissions — but now, if you have Turbo installed, a form without any data attributes will automatically be handled and ultimately submitted by Turbo’s javascript. This means form submissions are by default ajax requests, which don’t result in a full page load when the browser gets a response.
These constraints are deliberate and there’s no reason to debate them. But it is important to understand them and what they mean in practice. If we want to do something Turbo isn’t really designed for, what should we do? What can we do?
