"humanizing" model attributes presentation

Rails
1

Given a field in database defined as “discount_rate numeric(3,1)” I
found it not very usable for presenting it directly. For example, if
there’s a value 5.00 it will render in

<%= text_field ‘model’, 'discount_rate %>

as “0.5E1” which is not very friendly to user. All I do is that I write
kind of proxy accessors (prefixing with i_) for handling these
situations:

def i_discount_rate
sprintf(’%.2f’, discount_rate)
end

def i_discount_rate=(value)
self.discount_rate = value
end

Is there a better way for handling this? Having a bunch of input fields
makes the model fairly bigger in size.

–
Kamil

2

Kamil Kukura wrote:

Is there a better way for handling this? Having a bunch of input fields
makes the model fairly bigger in size.

A simple patch to actionpack to add a :format option to text_field
and text_field_tag would be the best solution.

–
We develop, watch us RoR, in numbers too big to ignore.

3

Next to what Mark said, a member of this forum is working on an
“object rendering” solution
(Look in the archive for the thread titled “Teaching Models to Render
Themselves in the Controller”

Alain