Question

I need to specify a minimum width for a select box input on a form using form_for(@project).

I have <%= f.select(:category, "", html_options{:size => 30} ) %>, but I’m getting a SyntaxError in the ActionController.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

The select helper takes four parameters. If you want to add an attribute to the HTML tag it generates, that’s provided in the fourth parameter. You’ll want to do something like this:

<%= f.select(:category, "", {}, {:size => 30}) %>

The html_options name you see in the Rails API is simply the internal parameter name used by Rails to apply those hash values to the tag it generates. You simply need to provide it a hash.

Also, the size of a select box doesn’t set the width or minimum width, it describes the number of elements to make visible vertically (See this jsFiddle for an example). So you may actually be looking for something more like this:

<%= f.select(:category, "", {}, {:style => "min-width: 100px;"}) %>