Formative¶ ↑

Formative is an extraction of the custom form builder I used in my last couple of Rails projects. It is the simplest thing that could possibly work for me. YMMV.

I am packaging this as a gem mainly for my personal use. So do not expect this to be any of well-documented, complete or refined.

I am using Formative together with this initializer to enable inline error messages:

# Show error messages next to form field labels
ActionView::Base.field_error_proc = Proc.new {|html_tag, instance_tag|
  if html_tag =~ /type="hidden"/ || !(html_tag =~ /<label/)
    html_tag
  else
    %(<span class="field-with-errors">#{html_tag} <span class="error-message">#{[instance_tag.error_message].flatten.first}</span></span>).html_safe
  end
}

Then just use ‘Formative::FormBuilder` as your builder – here is an example form (haml):

= form_for :resource, :builder => Formative::FormBuilder do |f|
  %fieldset
    %legend Request Form

    = f.text_field :bananas, :unit => 'kg',
                   :hint => 'Enter the amount of bananas in kg you would like to eat right now'

  .controls
    = f.submit 'Request', :disable_with => 'Request'
    %p.cancel= link_to 'Cancel', resource_path(@resource)

The generated markup would look something like this:

<form action="/resource" method="post">
  <fieldset>
    <legend>Request Form</legend>

    <p class="field text-field bananas">
      <label for="resource_bananas">Bananas</label>
      <input id="resource_bananas" name="resource[bananas]" type="text">
      <span class="unit">kg</span>
      <span class="hint">Enter the amount of bananas in kg you would like to eat right now</span>
    </p>
  </fieldset>

  <div class="controls">
    <input data-disable-with="Request" id="resource_submit" name="commit" type="submit" value="Request">
    <p class="cancel">
      <a href="/resource">Cancel</a>
    </p>
  </div>
</form>

You can customize the markup for each field with these options:

Option         Default         Possible Value(s)
:wrapper       :p              Symbol to specify alternate tag or false to suppress wrapper
:label         true            false to suppress label
:required      false/auto      true will add "required" as a class to the label
:label_class   auto            specify a class for the label directly
:hint          false           hint text
:unit          false           unit text

• Check out the latest master to make sure the feature hasn’t been implemented or the bug hasn’t been fixed yet

• Check out the issue tracker to make sure someone already hasn’t requested it and/or contributed it

• Fork the project

• Start a feature/bugfix branch

• Commit and push until you are happy with your contribution

• Make sure to add tests for it. This is important so I don’t break it in a future version unintentionally.

• Please try not to mess with the Rakefile, version, or history. If you want to have your own version, or is otherwise necessary, that is fine, but please isolate to its own commit so I can cherry-pick around it.

Copyright © 2011 Martin Rehfeld. See MIT-LICENSE for further details.