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Agile Web Development Using Rails 6

Generating Forms

Explore how to generate web forms using Rails Action View helpers to collect user input efficiently. Learn to implement text fields, select menus, and specialized inputs like email and search fields. This lesson helps you understand dynamic form creation and enhances user interaction in Rails applications.

We'll cover the following...

Gathering information using HTML form

HTML provides a number of elements, attributes, and attribute values that control how input is gathered. We could certainly hand-code our form directly into the template, but there is no need to do that.

In this chapter, we will cover a number of helpers that Rails provides to assist with this process.

HTML provides a number of ways to collect data in forms. A few of the more common means are shown below. Note that the form itself is not representative of any sort of typical use; in general, we’ll use only a subset of these methods to collect data.

Let’s look at the template that was used to produce that form:

HTML
<%= form_for(:model) do |form| %> 
<p>
    <%= form.label :input %>
    <%= form.text_field :input, :placeholder => 'Enter text here...' %> 
</p>
<p>
    <%= form.label :address, :style => 'float: left' %>
    <%= form.text_area :address, :rows => 3, :cols => 40 %> 
</p>
<p>
    <%= form.label :color %>:
    <%= form.radio_button :color, 'red' %> 
    <%= form.label :red %>
    <%= form.radio_button :color, 'yellow' %> 
    <%= form.label :yellow %>
    <%= form.radio_button :color, 'green' %> 
    <%= form.label :green %>
</p>
<p>
    <%= form.label 'condiment' %>: 
    <%= form.check_box :ketchup %> 
    <%= form.label :ketchup %>
    <%= form.check_box :mustard %> 
    <%= form.label :mustard %>
    <%= form.check_box :mayonnaise %>
    <%= form.label :mayonnaise %> 
</p>
<p>
    <%= form.label :priority %>:
    <%= form.select :priority, (1..10) %> 
</p>
<p>
    <%= form.label :start %>:
    <%= form.date_select :start %> 
</p>
<p>
    <%= form.label :alarm %>:
    <%= form.time_select :alarm %> 
</p>
<% end %>

In the above template, we’ll see a number of labels, like the one in line 3. We use labels to associate text with an input field ...