CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrubyactiverecord
asc99c
asc99c

Reputation: 3905

How to set a display name for a field in Rails

Is it possible to set a display name for a database field, instead of using the auto-generated one?

I've got a field bbe_date, and in screens, I am using 'Best Before' as the displayed string. I have been through a few views setting this manually, but is there a better way?

This would hopefully take effect wherever the field name is sent to the browser in human-readable form. I'm particularly thinking about validation errors as well (since that's the bit I haven't already handled manually!) - my validation code is doing:

record.errors.add :bbe_date, 'not valid'

but unless I specially intercept this, I just see 'Bbe date not valid' as the validation error.

Upvotes: 6

Views: 2608

Answers (2)

Mark Thomas
Mark Thomas

Reputation: 37517

One way do do this is to override the behavior of human_attribute_name which gives you the default display name. In your model:

HUMANIZED_ATTRIBUTES = {
  :bbe_date => "Best Before"
}

def self.human_attribute_name(attr, options={})
  HUMANIZED_ATTRIBUTES[attr.to_sym] || super
end

Note that if this is Rails 2, you'll need to remove the options param from human_attribute_name.

Upvotes: 0

Chowlett
Chowlett

Reputation: 46677

You need internationalization (I18N). Yup, even if you just want English.

Modify config/locales/en.yml, and set:

en:
  activerecord:
    attributes:
      your_lower_case_model_name:
        bbe_date: Best Before

Upvotes: 13

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