I'm making heavy use of a custom FormBuilder. Im using the common
wrapper method name "tagged_form_for" to wrap #form_for. However,
this limits me to _surrounding_ the <form/> with my tags (in this case
im using a table).
So my resulting output is along the lines of:
<table>
<form>
<tr><td>...stuff...</td></tr>
</form>
</table>
This isnt playing very well with firefox and innerHTML
I think a key problem with this is that it's not valid (X)HTML.
The problem I have with that is it appears to do that I have to
override the entire #form_for method. That will work _for now_ but Id
like to know if anyone has a more elegant solution to inject my
elements _after_ the <form> and before the </form> pieces. Without
requiring a hack such as <%= f.start_table %> <%= f.end_table %> would
be preferable.
I came across this technique on the web someplace, but I can't remember where. (I know I was reading the "When V is for Vexing" pdf[0] by Bruce Williams and Marcel Molina,Jr., which encourages custom view helpers in general and I googled quite a bit as well.)
While this doesn't solve the issue in the way you've described, perhaps it'll point you towards a satisfactory solution. This creates a form helper that automatically adds a label element for each input element.
# helpers/labeled_builder.rb
class LabeledBuilder < ActionView::Helpers::FormBuilder
def self.create_labeled_field(method_name)
define_method(%(labeled_#{method_name})) do |label, *args|
@template.content_tag("label",
label.to_s.humanize,
:for => %(#{@object_name}_#{label})) +
self.send(method_name.to_sym, label, *args)
end
end
field_helpers.each do |name|
create_labeled_field(name)
end
end
# helpers/builder_helper.rb
module BuilderHelper
def labeled_form_for(name, *args, &block)
options = args.last.is_a?(Hash) ? args.pop : { }
options = options.merge(:builder => LabeledBuilder)
args = (args << options)
form_for(name, *args, &block)
end
end
I've included BuilderHelper in ApplicationHelper.
I call it like:
<% labeled_form_for :object do |f| %>
<%= f.labeled_text_field :attr_1 %>
<%= f.labeled_text_area :attr_2 %>
<% end %>
I think you could extend this so it would automatically include the table start and end tags. I'm not sure how though 
Hope this helps.
Michael Glaesemann
grzm seespotcode net
[0](Codefluency.com)