Question

I’m using Devise for user registration. It automatically gives me the form for a new session:

<%= form_for(resource_name, resource, :url => session_path(resource_name)) do |f| %> 
.
.
.
<% end %>

I have the email and password label and fields like so:

<div class = "field">
    <%= f.label :email %><br />
    <%= f.text_field :email %>
</div>
<div class = "field">
    <%= f.label :password %><br />
    <%= f.password_field :password %>
</div>

But I’d like to add a class the the text_field and password_field so that I can style the boxes to make them look better.

<%= f.text_field :email, :class => "whatever" %>

did not work, so I looked in the Rails API and found a text_field method and did this:

<%= text_field(:user, :email, :class => "whatever" ) %>

which leaves out the “f” called in “form_for…do |f|”. Even so, I’m pretty sure it worked because when I “View Source”, the output (“id” and “name”) matches:

<div class = "field">
    <label for="user_email">Email</label><br />
    <input id="user_email" name="user[email]" size="30" type="text" value="" />
</div>



<div class = "field">
    <label for="user_email">Email</label><br />
    <input class="whatever" id="user_email" name="user[email]" size="30" type="text" value="" />
</div>

This all seems great that it works and the source looks like it’s fine, but I just want to get some confirmation from some more experienced developers to make sure that this definitely works and that there is nothing behind the scenes that is wrong before I make the change and have problems later.

Answer 1

Something else is wrong in your code.

<%= f.text_field :email, :class => "whatever" %>

Does what you want: you don’t need to specify the user model, because the form builder (the f) knows which model it’s dealing with.

For more info, read the introduction paragraph here: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/FormHelper.html#method-i-text_field