Question

I am working on a simple intranet application made with Rails 3.1.

I have a model for links which has the following fields:

name:string
url:string
colour:string

I have put the colour attribute into a class in the view, like so:

<a href="linkaddress" class="<%= link.colour %>">Link Name</a>

At the moment in the new link form I just have a simple form input in which the user can type anything and it will become the href class as expected.

What I would like to do is create a dropdown list of preset options, these options are simply red, green and blue (as an example). As this seems fairly simple, I don’t think there is any need for a helper.

I have read a few other questions and answers on SO and they seem to show examples where you have the name followed by an ID number. I just want to have the code below:

<select name="colour">
 <option value="red">Red</option>
 <option value="green">Green</option>
 <option value="blue">Blue</option>
</select>

I’m sure this is simple but I can’t get my head around it. I’ve read the Rails API info and the select_for_tag has confused me!

Answer 1

Just use a standard select element in your form to set the colour variable:

<%= f.select :colour, options_for_select([["Red", "red"], ["Green", "green"]], @link.colour) %>