I’ve been on a tear again working on Riding Resource. We’re trying to do something interesting and slightly social, but I can’t give it all away just yet. There are some forms involved, and I decided that I was going to try and save some time by using Justin French’s formtastic plugin. Well, it surely saved some time, but, as with anything new, there’s a learning curve.
Since one of the big things that Riding Resource does is help stables see who is searching for them (by storing lots of demographic information), I wanted to make sure that any data these forms captured would be easily reportable. In the case of select lists, that means having models for them with integers and text associated. But when poking around with formtastic, I couldn’t figure out how to make a specific field of the model display in the dropdown for the select. Here’s an example:
f.input :preferred_discipline, :as =>, :select, :collection => DemographicPreferredDiscipline.all |
melc in #rubyonrails on Freenode suggested that I try using a map. I’d seen these before, so I figured I’d give it a whirl:
f.input :preferred_discipline, :as => :select, :collection => DemographicPreferredDiscipline.all.map { |dp| [dp.text, dp.id] } |
Text is the name of the field I wanted to display in the select. What do you know? It worked! I figured I would share this here for posterity and Google indexing.