Update: This patch can now be installed as a rails plugin from my github.

I recently committed a patch for the “Keeping Forms Dry and Flexible” recipe found in Advanced Rails Recipes Book. The original recipe was written by Mike Mangino of Elevated Rails. The first time I used the recipe found in the book, I was pretty impressed… almost. Being a usability and accessibility freak that I am I saw that if you passed in the custom :label option (This is to print a custom label instead of the default table column name, which would be in this case… “Title”):

<%= f.text_field :title, :label => "custom label here" %>

This would print:

<label for="controller_title">Custom label here</label><input id="controller_title" type="text" value="some value here" size="30" name="controller[title]" label="custom label here"/>

Wha? There’s a label param in the input element? That’s not allowed!.  So I went off to Mike’s website and contacted him asking him if he had any updates to this recipe. He gladly created a new repository on github for me to pull from. I grabbed his new version of the error_handling_form_builder. Wow it’s different! Wow it’s got 2 form builders! One that lets you use templates like in the book and a more customizable one, that just uses content_tag methods to build a form. Both are pretty sweet and both use the same helper method. However when I tested, it still printed the label in the input. So I did a patch and Mike did a patch and now we have a dry, flexible, accessible, usable and badass form builder with 2 options for building forms! Or of course from Mike’s github.