` tags so we can give them some textual context. Put it all together and your HTML form will look like this: **Copy the code below to `views/food_form.erb`:** ```
``` Now if you run `shotgun` and go to the corresponding view (at the `/food_form` route in your browser), you'll see your very basic form. ### Connecting the Form to your Sinatra App If you try submitting the form, nothing will happen. That's because the form is not yet connected to our Application Controller in `app.rb`. There is nothing telling the form to send the user's data to our application. In order to connect the form to our application, we need to give it explicit directions on **where** and **how** to send the data from the user. Both of these pieces of data are attributes that we give our ` ``` Let's see what happens when we submit this form. [](https://camo.githubusercontent.com/edcb7ee5881cf3506612d74cc15cfabeb3047a78/687474703a2f2f73332e616d617a6f6e6177732e636f6d2f726561646d652d706963732f6c6f63616c686f73745f393339335f666f6f642e706e67) We get a Sinatra error! This is great news. Sinatra errors tell us exactly what we need to do next to make the form work. ## Post Routes and Params The error message Sinatra gives us is telling us that we don't have a route to receive the data from the HTML form that we created in `food_form.erb`. If you recall, we gave our form a method attribute of `POST` and an `action` attribute of `"/food"`. Again, this is the **how** and **where** the data goes from this form. Every form also needs a corresponding route in the controller file (`app.rb`). Instead of a `get` route (which we used to route users to view an html page), we'll set up a post route: Notice that both of the attributes from the form are covered in this route: The `method` `post` and the `action` `/food`. It's almost like a game of catch - the form is throwing the data to the server, which catches it by having the same receiving address (`/food`) and way of receiving the data (`post`). All user submitted data will appear in a `params` hash accessible throughout our Sinatra controllers. The `name` attribute of an `` corresponds to a key in the `params` hash for that data. If you create a text field input with ``, whenever the user submits that form, you will be able to access the data entered into the Favorite Foods text box via `params[:favorite_food]`. This is because we will be passing our data in the form of a hash, where the key will be the name of the data, and the value will be the data itself. In this case, we want our hash (which we call `params`) to look something like this: ``` params = { :name => "Sam", :favorite_food => "Green Eggs and Ham" } ``` So our input names will need to be `name` and `favorite_food`. ### Param I Am The data from the form comes nicely packaged up in the form of a hash called `params`. Let's set the return value of the post route to be params.to\_s, and see what our form does now\... ``` post '/food' do params.to_s end ``` When you submit your form, you should now see the contents of `params` displayed as a hash in your browser like this: ``` {"name"=>"Sam", "favorite_food"=>"Green Eggs and Ham"} ``` Great! This means you've been able to successfully get the data from the form in to the controller, and can now manipulate it any way you want. Let's use the key-value pairs in `params` to return the following phrase, using good-old string interpolation: ``` "My name is #{params[:name]}, and I love #{params[:favorite_food]}" ``` Here's the full post route and action in `app.rb`: **Add this code to `app.rb`:** ``` post '/food' do "My name is #{params[:name]}, and I love #{params[:favorite_food]}" end ``` Submit the form and see what happens! If you've gotten this far, you can successfully connect an HTML form to your Sinatra app, and you know how to use the `params` hash to access and manipulate data from the user. Clone this repo Here: