Spanish Inquisition

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

This is a simple and opinionated survey library for Rails. It generates the form using Formtastic, and it does not deal with persistence – the surveys are plain Ruby objects, not ActiveRecord objects. It fulfills our needs at Inspire9 nicely – and perhaps it’s what you’re looking for too.

It’s a gem – so, like any other gem, add it to your app’s Gemfile:

gem 'spanish_inquisition'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install spanish_inquisition

Firstly, you’ll want to define your surveys in files within app/surveys. Here’s a quick example:

SpanishInquisition::Survey.new :inquisition do |survey|
  survey.page do |page|
    page.question :weapon do |question|
      question.text    = 'What is your chief weapon?''
      question.style   = :one
      question.answers = ['fear', 'surprise', 'ruthless efficency']
    end

    page.question :torture do |question|
      question.text    = 'What do you torture with?'
      question.style   = :one
      question.answers = ['The Rack', 'The Cushions', 'The Comfy Chair']
    end
  end

  survey.page do |page|
    page.question :comments do |question|
      question.text     = 'Do you have any suggestions for better torture devices?'
      question.style    = :text
      question.required = false
    end

    page.question :cardinal do |question|
      question.text =  'Who is your favourite Cardinal: Ximinex, Biggles or Fang?'
      question.style = :string
    end
  end
end

Questions are required by default, and currently only three question styles are supported: :string (a standard text field), :text (a multi-line text field, aka the textarea HTML element), and :one (many options, single choice, aka radio inputs). The answers value can be anything that Formtastic accepts as a collection (so both arrays and hashes are valid settings).

Rendering the form is done via a presenter:

survey = SpanishInquisition::Presenter.new :inquisition, params[:survey]

And then, this presenter can be used within a Formtastic-built form in your views:

<%= semantic_form_for survey do |form| %>
  <%= survey.render_to form %>
  <%= form.actions do %>
    <%= form.action :submit, :label => 'Save my answers' %>
  <%- end %>
<%- end %>

When the form is posted back, you will have to persist the results somewhere – they can be obtained via the answers method on the presenter. It will return a hash with each question’s identifier as the keys, and the supplied answers as the values.

There’s a few more optoins available with questions, but the source is simple and uncomplicated – I’d recommend reading it.

This gem is built using git-flow – so keep in mind that the master branch is the release branch, develop is work-in-progress, and any in-progress features get their own feature branches.

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (`git checkout -b feature/name`)
3. Commit your changes (`git commit -am ‘Add some feature’`)
4. Push to the branch (`git push origin feature/name`)
5. Create new Pull Request

Copyright © 2013, Spanish Inquisition is developed and maintained by Pat Allan and Inspire9, and is released under the open MIT Licence.