Note: I am using Rails 2.3.10.
Normally, you can use Rails’ I18n system to generate label text.
For example, suppose you have a Person class with a name attribute. And this ERB: <%= form_for @person do |f| %> <%= f.label :name %> <%= f.text_field :name %> <% end %>
And you’d construct your en.yml like so: en: helpers: label: name: “your name”
However, this doesn’t work very well with related objects and accepts_nested_attributes_for. Suppose you have the same Person class as before. And person has_many :activities (likewise, activity belongs_to :person) and accepts_nested_attributes_for :activities.
Now your ERB looks like this: <%= form_for @person do |f| %> <%= f.label :name %> <%= f.text_field :name %> <% f.fields_for :activities do |a| %> <%= l.label :difficulty %> <%= l.text_field :difficulty %> <% end %> <% end %>
Various combinations indentation of person / activities / difficulty in my en.yml file didn’t work. So I looked inside rails to see what’s going on.
The relevant code is in actionpack-2.3.10/lib/action_view/helpers/form_helper.rb. The method used is
def to_label_tag(text = nil, options = {})
on line 758.
And the code doing the work is: content = if text.blank? i18n_label = I18n.t("helpers.label.#{object_name}.#{method_name}", :default => “”) i18n_label if i18n_label.present? else text.to_s end
The problem is you end up with a set of labels like: helpers.label.person[activities_attributes][0].difficulty helpers.label.person[activities_attributes][1].difficulty helpers.label.person[activities_attributes][2].difficulty
Is there a way you can put wildcards in YAML? If not, is there some other way around this limitation? If not, this seems like a bug in Rails, and I’ll file a lighthouse ticket.
Paul
