‘Iacta alea est’

Basic Form: Simple Form

Creating a form with Simple Form is almost identical to Formtastic. This is no surprise given the explicit inspiration for the DSL.

<%= simple_form_for @form,
    as: :subscription,
    url: email_subscriptions_path do |f| %>
  <%= f.input :email,
      label: "Email address",
      hint: "We'll never share your email with anyone else." %>
  <%= f.button :submit, "Submit", class: "btn-primary" %>
<% end %>

Something that is possible in both libraries, but that I didn’t mention the Formtastic post, is that you can further simplify the form definition by handling UI text with i18n configuration.

en:
  simple_form:
    labels:
      subscription:
        email: "Email address"
    hints:
      subscription:
        email: "We'll never share your email with anyone else."
  helpers:
    submit:
      subscription:
        create: "Submit"
        edit: "Submit"

This lifts the UI text away from the view and into the i18n configuration and the library proper. (The helpers key, used for defining the button text, is default Rails.)

The form could then be defined:

<%= simple_form_for @form,
    as: :subscription,
    url: email_subscriptions_path do |f| %>
  <%= f.input :email %>
  <%= f.button :submit, class: "btn-primary" %>
<% end %>

We’ve reduced the form all the way down to the point where it even feels unnecessary to write anything in the template apart from <%= @form.to_html %> or similar.

—Friday 25th June 2021.