How to have a drop down <select> field in a rails form?

Question

I am creating a scaffold -

rails g scaffold Contact email:string email_provider:string 

but I want the email provider to be a drop down (wi

Answer 1

This is a long way round, but if you have not yet implemented then you can originally create your models this way. The method below describes altering an existing database.

1) Create a new model for the email providers:
$ rails g model provider name

2) This will create your model with a name string and timestamps. It also creates the migration which we need to add to the schema with:
$ rake db:migrate

3) Add a migration to add the providers ID into the Contact:
$ rails g migration AddProviderRefToContacts provider:references

4) Go over the migration file to check it look OK, and migrate that too:
$ rake db:migrate

5) Okay, now we have a provider_id, we no longer need the original email_provider string:
$ rails g migration RemoveEmailProviderFromContacts

6) Inside the migration file, add the change which will look something like:

class RemoveEmailProviderFromContacts < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    remove_column :contacts, :email_provider
  end
end

7) Once that is done, migrate the change:
$ rake db:migrate

8) Let's take this moment to update our models:
Contact: belongs_to :provider
Provider: has_many :contacts

9) Then, we set up the drop down logic in the _form.html.erb partial in the views:

  

    <%= f.label :provider %>

    <%= f.collection_select :provider_id, Provider.all, :id, :name %>
  

10) Finally, we need to add the provders themselves. One way top do that would be to use the seed file:

Provider.destroy_all

gmail = Provider.create!(name: "gmail")
yahoo = Provider.create!(name: "yahoo")
msn = Provider.create!(name: "msn")

$ rake db:seed