kyleheon.com

My Rails option_tag

Posted by Kyle Heon Thu, 13 Jul 2006 20:31:00 GMT

Being relatively new to Ruby and Rails I’ve been taking it slow as I work through an application that I’m building, mostly for fun but has applicability when finished where I work.

Anyways, I have a series of multiple select boxes that exist on a particular form. In all my research online I wasn’t able to find a helper method that would handle multiple select boxes. Given that I decided to write a helper myself. At the moment this just writes out just the option tag and selects it if the value matches something found in a passed in collection.

Here is the helper code:

def option_tag(value, title, collection)
    begin
      if (!collection.empty? and collection.find(value))
        selected = " selected=\"selected\""
      end
    rescue
      selected = nil
    end
    "<option value=\"#{value}\"#{selected}>#{title}</option>"
  end

Here’s how to use it:

<p><label for="browser_id">Browsers</label><br />
  <select id="browser_id" name="browser[id][]" size="5" multiple="multiple">
    <% for browser in @browsers %>
      <%= option_tag(browser.id, browser.name, @item.browsers) %>
    <% end %>
  </select>
  </p>

I’ll probably look into building something that can handle a multiple select and reuse as much of the Rails helper methods as possible.

If I completely missed something and can actually do what I want using what Rails offers please let me know, I’d rather use what is there then roll my own unless I have a good reason to.

Also, should you see something glaringly wrong or inefficient in my code above please say so, as I said, I’m just learning Ruby and Rails and want to learn how to do things the right way.