Action View Form Helpers

Form helpers are designed to make working with resources much easier compared to using vanilla HTML.

Typically, a form designed to create or update a resource reflects the identity of the resource in several ways: (i) the URL that the form is sent to (the form element’s action attribute) should result in a request being routed to the appropriate controller action (with the appropriate :id parameter in the case of an existing resource), (ii) input fields should be named in such a way that in the controller their values appear in the appropriate places within the params hash, and (iii) for an existing record, when the form is initially displayed, input fields corresponding to attributes of the resource should show the current values of those attributes.

In Rails, this is usually achieved by creating the form using form_for and a number of related helper methods. form_for generates an appropriate form tag and yields a form builder object that knows the model the form is about. Input fields are created by calling methods defined on the form builder, which means they are able to generate the appropriate names and default values corresponding to the model attributes, as well as convenient IDs, etc. Conventions in the generated field names allow controllers to receive form data nicely structured in params with no effort on your side.

For example, to create a new person you typically set up a new instance of Person in the PeopleController#new action, @person, and in the view template pass that object to form_for:

<%= form_for @person do |f| %>
  <%= f.label :first_name %>:
  <%= f.text_field :first_name %><br />

  <%= f.label :last_name %>:
  <%= f.text_field :last_name %><br />

  <%= f.submit %>
<% end %>

The HTML generated for this would be (modulus formatting):

<form action="/people" class="new_person" id="new_person" method="post">
  <input name="authenticity_token" type="hidden" value="NrOp5bsjoLRuK8IW5+dQEYjKGUJDe7TQoZVvq95Wteg=" />
  <label for="person_first_name">First name</label>:
  <input id="person_first_name" name="person[first_name]" type="text" /><br />

  <label for="person_last_name">Last name</label>:
  <input id="person_last_name" name="person[last_name]" type="text" /><br />

  <input name="commit" type="submit" value="Create Person" />
</form>

As you see, the HTML reflects knowledge about the resource in several spots, like the path the form should be submitted to, or the names of the input fields.

In particular, thanks to the conventions followed in the generated field names, the controller gets a nested hash params[:person] with the person attributes set in the form. That hash is ready to be passed to Person.new:

@person = Person.new(params[:person])
if @person.save
  # success
else
  # error handling
end

Interestingly, the exact same view code in the previous example can be used to edit a person. If @person is an existing record with name “John Smith” and ID 256, the code above as is would yield instead:

<form action="/people/256" class="edit_person" id="edit_person_256" method="post">
  <input name="_method" type="hidden" value="patch" />
  <input name="authenticity_token" type="hidden" value="NrOp5bsjoLRuK8IW5+dQEYjKGUJDe7TQoZVvq95Wteg=" />
  <label for="person_first_name">First name</label>:
  <input id="person_first_name" name="person[first_name]" type="text" value="John" /><br />

  <label for="person_last_name">Last name</label>:
  <input id="person_last_name" name="person[last_name]" type="text" value="Smith" /><br />

  <input name="commit" type="submit" value="Update Person" />
</form>

Note that the endpoint, default values, and submit button label are tailored for @person. That works that way because the involved helpers know whether the resource is a new record or not, and generate HTML accordingly.

The controller would receive the form data again in params[:person], ready to be passed to Person#update:

if @person.update(params[:person])
  # success
else
  # error handling
end

That’s how you typically work with resources.

actiontext/app/helpers/action_text/tag_helper.rb
actionview/lib/action_view/helpers/form_helper.rb