Admin
1
I'm trying to create a drop down menu to allow a user to change an entry's field in my table. The user has one of three options -- hot, medium and cold.
I already have text_fields that do essentially the same thing for other fields, that all update when the user clicks on a submit_tag.
Is there an easy way to implement a drop-down box and have the result saved with the submit_tag ?
thanks,
-Chris
I'll assume 2 things:
<%= form_for @model_instance idiom (explained on section 2.2 of this guide).Let's say that you have two fields, called :name and :temperature, controlled by two text_fields:
<% form_for @article do |f| %>
<%= f.text_field :name %>
<%= f.text_field :temperature %>
<%= f.submit "Create" %> <% end %>
<% end %>
Now you want to change the :temperature control to a dropdown list, accepting hot, medium and cold as values. Then you can do that this way:
<% form_for @article do |f| %>
<%= f.text_field :name %>
<%= f.collection_select :temperature, Article::TEMPERATURES, :to_s, :to_s,
:include_blank => true
%>
<%= f.submit "Create" %> <% end %>
<% end %>
You will now have to define the Article::TEMPERATURES constant in your Article model. It shouldn't be very difficult:
class Article < Activerecord::Base
TEMPERATURES = ['hot', 'medium', 'cold']
You may be wondering why I added the :include_blank part on the collection_select. This will add an "empty" option on your dropdown list. You will need that empty option when creating new objects, unless you want a "default" value to temperature.
You might want to consider formtastic gem which is lot less code.
<% semantic_form_for @stuff do |f| %>
<% f.inputs do %>
<%= f.input :name %>
<%= f.input :temperature, :as => :select,
:label => "Degree", :include_blank => false,
:collection => [["Hot", 1], ["Medium", 2], ["Cold", 3]] %>
<% end %>
<%= f.buttons %>
<% end %>