In my travels as a Rails developer I write or rather generate a lot of forms.  In most web applications I build it’s desirable to have forms that look uniform across the entire application. I have been working on apps where I wish I had one place to change the out put of all forms.  To solve this problem I wrote a helper that renders a partial and outputs one form look for the entire app. First lets look at the code in the view of the form

  <% label = f.label :email %>
  <% element = f.text_field :email %>
  <% help = 'Please enter a valid email address' %>
  <%= form_element label, element, help %>

Here we are in side a form_for block. This is the standard form_for block rails scaffolding builds for us. I am setting both the label and the form element and passing it to values. I suspect there is a better way to do this with blocks. If there is please reply to my post and let me know.

Next lets look at the form_element method.

  def form_element(label, field, help)
    return render :partial => 'shared/form_element', :locals => { :label => label, :field => field, :help => help }
  end

Basically renders a partial and passes all the values to it. Here is the partial

<p class="form_paragraph">
	<div class="label_container">
		<%= label %>
	</div>
 
	<div class="form_element">
		<%= field %> 
	</div>
 
	<div class="form_help">
		<%= help %>
	</div>
 
</p>

Done.

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