Form_for FormBuilder

Rails
1

I’m making heavy use of a custom FormBuilder. Im using the common
wrapper method name “tagged_form_for” to wrap #form_for. However,
this limits me to surrounding the with my tags (in this case
im using a table).

So my resulting output is along the lines of:

...stuff...

This isnt playing very well with firefox and innerHTML (hard to
explain, but it makes the form invisible). The solution is to render
it more appropriately like so:

...stuff...

The problem I have with that is it appears to do that I have to
override the entire #form_for method. That will work for now but Id
like to know if anyone has a more elegant solution to inject my
elements after the and before the pieces. Without
requiring a hack such as <%= f.start_table %> <%= f.end_table %> would
be preferable.

If I come up with anything in the meantime I will post it back here as
well.

Joe

2

On Aug 3, 2007, at 17:41 , Joe N. wrote:

...stuff...

This isnt playing very well with firefox and innerHTML

I think a key problem with this is that it’s not valid (X)HTML.

The problem I have with that is it appears to do that I have to
override the entire #form_for method. That will work for now but Id
like to know if anyone has a more elegant solution to inject my
elements after the and before the pieces. Without
requiring a hack such as <%= f.start_table %> <%= f.end_table %> would
be preferable.

I came across this technique on the web someplace, but I can’t
remember where. (I know I was reading the “When V is for Vexing” pdf
[0] by Bruce W. and Marcel Molina,Jr., which encourages custom
view helpers in general and I googled quite a bit as well.)
While this doesn’t solve the issue in the way you’ve described,
perhaps it’ll point you towards a satisfactory solution. This creates
a form helper that automatically adds a label element for each input
element.

helpers/labeled_builder.rb

class LabeledBuilder < ActionView::Helpers::FormBuilder
def self.create_labeled_field(method_name)
define_method(%(labeled_#{method_name})) do |label, *args|
@template.content_tag(“label”,
label.to_s.humanize,
:for => %(#{@object_name}_#{label})) +
self.send(method_name.to_sym, label, *args)
end
end

field_helpers.each do |name|
create_labeled_field(name)
end
end

helpers/builder_helper.rb

module BuilderHelper
def labeled_form_for(name, *args, &block)
options = args.last.is_a?(Hash) ? args.pop : { }
options = options.merge(:builder => LabeledBuilder)
args = (args << options)
form_for(name, *args, &block)
end
end

I’ve included BuilderHelper in ApplicationHelper.

I call it like:

<% labeled_form_for :object do |f| %>
<%= f.labeled_text_field :attr_1 %>
<%= f.labeled_text_area :attr_2 %>
<% end %>

I think you could extend this so it would automatically include the
table start and end tags. I’m not sure how though :slight_smile:

Hope this helps.

Michael G.
grzm seespotcode net

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