There are actually several tickets that show this behavior (bug?). I
believe the OP is writing to ask whether this is the desired behavior,
or whether it should be treated as a bug and we should be pushing to
commit patches relating to it.
At least to me, it ‘feel’s’ like kinda odd behavior.
It seems inconsistent:
IMHO product.price() should display the exact same value as form.text_field :price.
Also the method header is: text_field(object_name, method, options = {}), which imho implies that ‘method’ is going to be called on ‘object_name’.
There must have been some reason for this behavior.
validates_numericality_of
if you have an integer field, and the user types in "a12345" instead
of "12345". When displaying error messages you want to display the
value before it was typecast, otherwise it'd just be set to 0. So the
field helper doesn't look directly in the database, it uses
price_before_type_cast, if it exists.
So the behaviour is intentional, if somewhat opaque. Perhaps what's
needed is a way to make it easier to wrap attributes with custom
accessors and mutators?
Maybe we could fix validates_numericality_of? Rather than changing
every field helper because of one case? I suppose it is more difficult
that way around however.
The docs really do make it seem like it calls the method. So we'd need
to remember to change those
Maybe we could fix validates_numericality_of? Rather than changing
every field helper because of one case? I suppose it is more difficult
that way around however.
It's also totally random behaviour to sometimes get a String from an
otherwise numeric attribute. I'm not sure that there's a really
simple fix that'll magically solve every case we could come across,
but I do believe that if we find the cases where this behaviour is
biting people, we'll probably be able to solve those cases nicely.
My understanding is that the most common case is something along the
lines of "I want to store the number of cents instead of a dollar
amount"? What else breaks?
It seems the real problem is two fold:
1) it's kinda surprising that overriding the accessors doesn't
automatically work
2) The docs outright lie and tell you that it will work.
The docs really do make it seem like it calls the method. So we'd need
to remember to change those
That’s still no good. You want to be able to display to the user exactly what he entered, unconditionally. Doing what you suggested would make the behavior even more inconsistent.
The real problem seems to be that people want to format attributes
before they display them (credit card, phone number). So, how about we
allow that. Could be as simple as:
That takes care of the transformation in one direction, but not the
other. I suppose you can just handle that the usual way with a
before_validation callback. Sorry if that's silly, I haven't been
following this thread in detail.
In the example I was needing this for: We need to allow people to enter prices in dutch format, i.e.:
12,25 (notice the comma). Before storing this into the database we would like to transform this value to: 12.25 (notice the dot).
When displaying the value in the view we need to do the opposite, retrieve the value from the database and replace dots by comma’s and display the value to the end user.
We solved this easily using a virtual attribute, however, it would be nice if it were just possible to override getters and setters in AR. It just seems awkward that this is not possible for helper methods.
Why is this so hard? Why not save the original value typed in by the end user, and if validation goes wrong just display the original entered value, else just use the overridden setter?
> > How about this for a solution.
> >
> > The real problem seems to be that people want to format attributes
> > before they display them (credit card, phone number). So,
how about we
> > allow that. Could be as simple as:
> >
> > <%= text_field :person, :name, :formatter => :random -%>
> >
+1
I would love for this to be in core. I have been feeling the pain of
hacking around this for sometime.
Sometimes (or perhaps generally) form builders and objects are too
closely tied -- surely you do not want to pollute your model with a
lot of user interface stuff. Instead, a level of indirection is
useful, such as a form model:
class ProductForm
def initialize(object)
@object = object
end
def dutch_price
('%.2f' % @object.price).gsub('.', ',')
end
def dutch_price=(price)
@object.price = price.to_s.gsub(',', '.')
end
def method_missing(name, *args, &block)
@object.send(name, *args, &block)
end
end
Now you can do:
<% form_for :product, @product do |form| %>
<%= form.text_field :title %>
<%= form.text_field :dutch_price %>
<% end %>
I'm happy to put together a patch if everyone is happy with that soution...?
Another thing to check is if it's feasible to make the form helpers
only use _before_type_cast if the field is invalid? Perhaps that'll
allow for a relatively low-impact solution?
