Question

I have to loop through an unknown set of attributes and build a edit form
and I am not understanding clearly the way form_for works, and the syntax required.

trying to do something like this:

  - @thing.attributes.each_pair do |name, value|
    = f.label name
    = f.text_field value

while the label part works, the actual text_field does not

Answer 1

text_field should be passed the name of the field rather than the current value so needs to be

f.text_field name

See the example at the top of this page: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/FormHelper.html

Rails will pick up the current value of the field from the object that you’ve passed to form_for so it doesn’t need to be one of the parameters to text_field.