Rails - May 2005 - Selecting target object for belongs_to association?

What''s the proper way to select the target object for a belongs_to 
association in a view?

In my three weeks with Rails, so far, I''ve used

    collection_select "entry", "category_id",
      @categories, "id", "title"

Now, this works -- almost. Validation error messages are not associated 
with the generated tag, because there are no errors on related_id. If 
any, there are errors on related.

Looking at 

http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/show/HowtoUseFormOptionHelpers
http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/1125

the right way would appear to be

    select "entry", "category", Category.find(:all).collect
{|c|
      [ c.title, c.id ] }

Which has the obvious drawback that it results in an error on submit:

    Category expected, got String

Which is no surprise, really, as in the response entry["category"] is 
bound to the ID of the to be associated record, not the record itself.

That leaves me stumped. What''s the way to handle this stuff?

Michael

-- 
Michael Schuerig                              Life is just as deadly
mailto:michael-q5aiKMLteq4b1SvskN2V4Q@public.gmane.org                          
As it looks
http://www.schuerig.de/michael/          --Richard Thompson, Sibella