_form generation

Hi group,

starting up with rails, coming from the perl world I was confused about some of the concepts behind rails. What I wonder most at the moment is the follwoing :

I created a rails project, creates the databases and a table looking like so :

drop table if exists bla; create table client( id int not null auto_increment, name varchar(40) not null, flag boolean not null, primary key(id) );

... after that I creates my first scaffold and a controller named Admin

script/generate scaffold Client Admin.

I exspected a new/edit mask like that :

a textfield for the name a checkbox for the bool flag

but I was disapointed, I found a select with the options true and false. Since I'd like to create something like a licensing application I need to create licenses where there need to be set 128 Boolean flags. This could easily be done using checkboxes but becomes the horror using selects.

So I dropped down the select fiel by hand and created a checkbox on my own. It took hours(!!!) to get the right formatted list of arguments till it worked. Meanwhile I was confused by :

ri checkbox

.... did not find anything when issuing

ri check_box

And even after a ./gem_server redirecting my browser to localhost:8808 I did not find any sentence about checkboxes.

Ok, so far, I got it. But if I create my real world applicaion now I'd need to set all 128 checkboxes by hand, and this is something I dont understand. Booleans - in my opinion - are greatfully predestinated to be mapped on checkboxes, why does'nt rails act that way?

Can I change rails behaviour or is there any other way to map a checked/unchecked checkbox as true/false 1/0 in my table?

The second question I have is, is there any easier way to find documentation for inbuild calls?

Greets Jason Nerer support[ at ]esiqia.com