ActiveForm plugin

Published at: 24.IX.2007 12:49 CEST
Categories: active_form, english, plugin, rails

Last week at RailsConf Europe I met some people who are using my ActiveForm code to make forms in their Rails sites. It’s about time to wrap it up as a plugin, so here it is.

From the README:

This plugin provides a base class for making forms with ActiveRecord validations without having a corresponding database table. You can use ActiveForm for:

  • making forms which don’t needed storage, like simple email forms
  • provide extra validations on existing ActiveRecord models
  • make forms for composite objects

Installation:

script/plugin install http://svn.remvee.net/plugins/active_form

I know, there already is a plugin called active_form but I don’t like it. It doesn’t provide a “real” AR object causing all kinds of things to not work (like ActiveRecordHelper#form and DateHelper#datetime_select for instance), it doesn’t include any tests and my version is a lot simpler (flog score 20 versus 74).

Why not change the name? I like it! If you can come up with something better, please leave a comment.

p3t0r @ about 11 hours

Probably just being pedantic here, but I noticed your active form plugin is based upon ‘columns’ whereas this doesn’t seem correct to me if one is not talking about tabular data.

Why didn’t you go for the ( IMHO ) more obivious ‘fields’ solution?

Remco @ about 12 hours

The column method actually adds columns to the object. Changing the method name to field means I should provide aliases to all column related methods like column_names and columns_hash.

Note, it still is an ActiveRecord object! It has a database connection, the save method is protected by an transaction and other goodies are still in place.