ActiveForm plugin
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.
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?
The
column
method actually adds columns to the object. Changing the method name tofield
means I should provide aliases to all column related methods likecolumn_names
andcolumns_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.