[Rails] Form Questions

[Lon Baker]

Ok,

Excuse the basic questions I am a recovering Java/WebObjects developer. 
;) Currently to learn Rail I am porting a WebObjects application over 
to it and am having great success. But have encountered a few areas of 
difficulty that I am hoping I can tackle with a little help.

Coming from the world WO I am accustomed to attaching "actions" to 
submit buttons. This provided some flexibility in some ways and 
obviously handicapped my thinking in other ways.


For example, Form -> list of actions -> submit "act" and list of 
filters -> submit "filter"

In rails how would one go about this? How would one differentiate which 
button was pressed?

They must be in a single form which wraps a table and leads to my next 
question.

Also I have some paginated lists that contain checkboxes on each row to 
allow acting on sets of records. As I moved from page to page in the 
previous environment we just added the checked records to an array and 
then acted upon all of them. This was handled in a "automagical" manner 
that shielded the developer from the heavy lifting.

Are there any methods in Rails that helps manage this type of UI?

Sorry if these are rudimentary questions. I am trying to break old mind 
set and embrace the rails way so any help is greatly appreciated.

--
Thanks.
Lon Baker
AIM: spdemac