CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsruby-on-rails-3
marcamillion
marcamillion

Reputation: 33755

How do I generate a bunch of checkboxes from a collection?

I have two models User and Category that have a HABTM association.

I would like to generate checkboxes from a collection of Category items on my view, and have them associated with the current_user.

How do I do that?

Thanks.

P.S. I know that I can do the equivalent for a dropdown menu with options_from_collection_for_select. I also know that Rails has a checkbox_tag helper. But not quite sure how to do both of them. I know I can just do it manually with an each loop or something, but am wondering if there is something native to Rails 3 that I am missing.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 125

Answers (2)

nathanvda
nathanvda

Reputation: 50057

Did you check out formtastic or simple_form

They have helpers to write your forms more easily, also to handle simple associations.

E.g. in simple_form you can just write

= simple_form_for @user do
  = f.association :categories, :as => :check_boxes

In form_tastic you would write

= simple_form_for @user do
  = f.input :categories, :as => :check_boxes

Hope this helps.

Upvotes: 2

Andrew Vit
Andrew Vit

Reputation: 19249

You can use a collection_select and feed it the options. Assuming you have a form builder wrapped around a user instance, you can do something like this:

form_for current_user do |f|
f.collection_select(
  :category_ids,            # the param key, so params[:user][:category_ids]
  f.object.categories,      # the collection of items in the list
  :id,                      # option value
  :name                     # option string
)
end

You may want to pass the :multiple => true option on the end if needed.

Upvotes: 0

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