I don't have a blog, but wanted to share this little bit of code with other semi-beginners like myself who are still learning to take advantage of rails features.
Selecting an attribute with a boolean switch is a common pattern in forms. You can do it with a check box, but radio buttons are more expressive in some situations and better convey to the user that they are making a mandatory choice. But doing this with radio buttons typically takes 5 lines of html: 3 labels and 2 radio buttons.
Here's a simple boolean button helper that you can put in your custom form builder.
class YourCustomFormBuilder < ActionView::Helpers::FormBuilder ... def boolean_buttons_for(method, label_true = "true", label_false = "false" ) @template.content_tag("div", @template.label(@object_name, method, method.to_s.humanize, :class => 'align' ) + @template.radio_button( @object_name, method, true ) + @template.label( @object_name, method.to_s + "_true", label_true ) + @template.radio_button( @object_name, method, false ) + @template.label( @object_name, method.to_s + "_false", label_false ), :class => "row") end ... end
Then you can create a set of boolean button tags in your view like this:
<% form_for :person, :builder => YourCustomFormBuilder do |f| %> ... <%= f.boolean_buttons_for :happy, "Yes", "No" %> #DRY ... <% end %>
The above assumes you are using a custom form builder and building your forms with the form_for helper. If you are not using a custom builder, I assume you could open up the default FormBuilder and stick it in there. If you're not using form builders, this code won't work for you, but you could follow a similar pattern within ApplicationHelper or your ControllerHelper. You'll have to get rid of @template and @object_name, as they are only available inside the FormBuilder object.