RJ,
Use the ActionView method <a href="http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ ActionView/Helpers/FormOptionsHelper.html#M000506">select</a>. For instance, lets say you have three groups: red, green, and blue and the column in your users table is "group".
<%= select 'users', 'group', {"Red" => "red", "Green" => "green", "Blue" => "blue"}, {:include_blank => true} %>
The keys (Red, Green, and Blue) are what are displayed in the actual drop down box. The values (red, green, and blue) are what are stored in the "group" column of the user's row. By default the select method will automatically select whatever is in the user's group column. For instance:
@user = User.find(1) @user.group #=> "green"
If you were to pull up a page with the above select tag for this user, the select tag should have the "Green" value automatically selected.
Another note... if you have the possible group values hardcoded somewhere else in your code, you can replace the hardcoded options hash with a reference to the variables in your code (however, these must either be in a hash or an array format ... see docs for more details). So if you had:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base GROUPS = { "Red" => "red", "Green" => "green", "Blue" => "blue" } end
Then you could do:
<%= select 'users', 'group', User.GROUPS, {:include_blank => true} %>
