Related <select> Dropdowns in Rails Views

Posted by Trey on July 04, 2007

This is a pretty common scenario (I would think). You have a nested model that you want to be able to select the item that the current item depends on (the client for a project, the manufacturer for an appliance). Using form_for, you can do something like this.

Chat with JTJ:

What you do is create a select tag with the “select” method like so: (using the client/project scenario)

f.select(:client_id,

The next value you pass to the select method has to be an array of text/value pairs

like this: [ [ "Jason Johnson", 1], ["Trey Piepmeier", 2], ["Royall", 3] ]

In order to create this array, you do a find on your clients table and use Ruby’s “collect” method.

like so:

Client.find(:all).collect {|c| [ c.name, c.id ]}

So, altogether now:

f.select(:client_id, Client.find(:all).collect {|c| [ c.name, c.id ] })

Other sources:

Title Case in ERb

Posted by Trey on July 04, 2007

Use .titleize or .titlecase. I’m using this in the <title> tag of my application.rhtml:

<%= controller.action_name.titleize %>

Source

Date formatting in Ruby

Posted by Trey on September 20, 2006

Source

Here it is:

%a - The abbreviated weekday name (``Sun'')
%A - The  full  weekday  name (``Sunday'')
%b - The abbreviated month name (``Jan'')
%B - The  full  month  name (``January'')
%c - The preferred local date and time representation
%d - Day of the month (01..31)
%H - Hour of the day, 24-hour clock (00..23)
%I - Hour of the day, 12-hour clock (01..12)
%j - Day of the year (001..366)
%m - Month of the year (01..12)
%M - Minute of the hour (00..59)
%p - Meridian indicator (``AM''  or  ``PM'')
%S - Second of the minute (00..60)
%U - Week  number  of the current year,
        starting with the first Sunday as the first
        day of the first week (00..53)
%W - Week  number  of the current year,
        starting with the first Monday as the first
        day of the first week (00..53)
%w - Day of the week (Sunday is 0, 0..6)
%x - Preferred representation for the date alone, no time
%X - Preferred representation for the time alone, no date
%y - Year without a century (00..99)
%Y - Year with century
%Z - Time zone name
%% - Literal ``%'' character

 t = Time.now
 t.strftime("Printed on %m/%d/%Y")   #=> "Printed on 04/09/2003"
 t.strftime("at %I:%M%p")            #=> "at 08:56AM"

More information. Might it be better to use .to_formatted_s(:db) or .to_s(:db)? Not sure what that means.