Rails Cookbook review

rubyonrails-talk
1

Guys:

Stuck at the mall today, and just had to crack Rails Cookbook, by O'Reilly. It had a recipe for accepting dynamically created forms. The recipe resolved to build a grid on a page, and submit it with enumerable form post names.

The sample output looked like this (reconstructed):

  p params[:my_form]

  > ["1-1" => 0, "1-2" => 0, "1-3" => 0, "2-1" => 0, "2-2" => 0,      "2-3" => 0, "3-1" => 0, "3-2" => 0, "3-3" => 0]

Does anyone have the book to hand? The technical problem here is...

  > naming a form field different from its ID is bad luck   > an HTML ID should not start with a numeral (right?)

Can someone check if the book permits this bug in the IDs? Ruby form helpers make it kind'a easy...

2

Stuck at the mall today, and just had to crack Rails Cookbook, by O'Reilly. It had a recipe for accepting dynamically created forms. The recipe resolved to build a grid on a page, and submit it with enumerable form post names.

The sample output looked like this (reconstructed):

  p params[:my_form]

  > ["1-1" => 0, "1-2" => 0, "1-3" => 0, "2-1" => 0, "2-2" => 0,      "2-3" => 0, "3-1" => 0, "3-2" => 0, "3-3" => 0]

Does anyone have the book to hand? The technical problem here is...

  > naming a form field different from its ID is bad luck

Where do you get this from? There's nothing wrong with naming a form field something other than it's ID, or not giving it an ID at all.

  > an HTML ID should not start with a numeral (right?)

I'd have to check the HTML/XML spec, but that sounds right. Anyway, the simplest solution is to use the name prefixed with something (e.g. dynamic_) as the ID. Mind you, I suspect most browsers will happily deal with whatever string you put in the ID field, numeric or not.

Can someone check if the book permits this bug in the IDs? Ruby form helpers make it kind'a easy...

I don't even know what you're asking here.

   Phlip

--Greg

3

Gregory Seidman wrote:

  > naming a form field different from its ID is bad luck

Where do you get this from? There's nothing wrong with naming a form field something other than it's ID, or not giving it an ID at all.

It's just "bad luck". As in "superstition causes bad luck".

  > an HTML ID should not start with a numeral (right?)

I'd have to check the HTML/XML spec, but that sounds right.

I suspect some validators catch it, too.

I don't even know what you're asking here.

I did not buy the book. If anyone has it, can they check the source and see if a published Rails book lead users to create invalid IDs?

Ruby helpers, such as check_box_tag, tend to clone 'name's to produce 'id's. So that's one way Rails could accidentally generate invalid IDs...