Adding new document actions

In your CatalogController, you need to register an action using add_action. If the action will receive form data from a POST request, you can also register a callback for handling that request. Optionally, the POST params can be validated using a helper method.

class CatalogController
  include Blacklight::Catalog
  ...

  # Register a new action called "email".
  # On a POST request, validate the params using the `#validate_email_params` method
  # and process the request using `#email_action`.
  add_action :email, :email_action, validator: :validate_email_params

  def validate_email_params
    # validate that the posted params are suitable for the action
  end

  def email_action documents
    # send an email with the attached documents
  end
 
  ...
end

The action name is, by convention, the name of the template to render for that action. In this case, we may render the catalog/email.html.erb template when the action is selected. This template provides a form, which, when submitted, will trigger the email_action method and will render the catalog/email_success.html.erb template.