I searched so long and hard for this and now feel compelled to post it here with some good keywords so that others can find it.

I wanted to create a preview page for my form submission in rails. I found a couple people who had tried some stuff, but none of the examples were elegant at all.

Luckily I found a post on the rails forum that lead me to search my favorite site for learning rails things, railscasts. Here's the specific episode I found:

Multibutton Form

Hope this helps anyone else trying to create a submission preview. The solution is simple and elegant, the way everything in rails should be. Thanks againg to Ryan Bates at railscasts.