Caution! - Many of these posts are creepy-old in the Ruby on Rails world (before 1.0!)
The :author => Charles Abbott now blogs here

Rails - HTML Select Tag

2006-04-05 [ 2 comments ]

So here I am, after a recent recess from all things programming, ready to learn more about Ruby, Rails and the Agile way of thinking. And of course as I learn so shall I post many of my experiences, whether complex or quite trivial.

Thus today it shall be nothing more than a trivial exploration into the HTML select tag.

Let us start with the basics, why? good question... because I want to. To create a form using ruby embedded in your .rhtml file simply include the following:

<%= start_form_tag :action => "some_method" %>
... (here is where form elements go) ...
<%= submit_tag 'Submit' %>
<%= end_form_tag =>

To include a select box you only need to add 'select_tag' with any necessary options. The select tag is basically written as so:

<%= select_tag 'tag_name', *option_tags_here* =>

I included a placeholder '*option_tags_here*' to signify that you really have 2 choices in this spot (maybe more that I do not know about). You can either have your options as an array / hash such as:

["Option1","Option2","Option3"]

Or you can include the tag options_for_select which allows you to easily choose a default... to use it simply type:

options_for_select(["Option1","Option2","Option3"], "Option2")

In the above case, Option2 is the default selection.

Well that is all for todays post. Outside of the past 2 weeks, I have been stretching my time between Ruby on Rails, working on several PHP projects, and learning RPG (yes, Report Program Generator - the IBM iSeries native language). I look forward to getting into more advanced topics soon. Adieu.

:author => "Charles Abbott"
Converting to Ruby on Rails

Jim said:

Nice. I like the options_for_select tag - didn't know it was around.

I'll have to use that one!

Later

2006-04-14 19:44:55 UTC

Charles said:

Yeah, its pretty neat... I included it in the tag, which can make it kinda big... i.e. <%= select_tag 'thought[frontpage]', options_for_select(["Y","N"], "N") , :options => nil %>

2006-04-14 23:23:44 UTC

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