Rails - Mar 2006 - "humanizing" model attributes presentation

Given a field in database defined as "discount_rate numeric(3,1)" I 
found it not very usable for presenting it directly. For example, if 
there''s a value 5.00 it will render in

   <%= text_field ''model'', ''discount_rate %>

as "0.5E1" which is not very friendly to user. All I do is that I
write
kind of proxy accessors (prefixing with i_) for handling these situations:

def i_discount_rate
   sprintf(''%.2f'', discount_rate)
end

def i_discount_rate=(value)
   self.discount_rate = value
end


Is there a better way for handling this? Having a bunch of input fields 
makes the model fairly bigger in size.

-- 
Kamil

Kamil Kukura wrote:
> Given a field in database defined as "discount_rate numeric(3,1)"
I
> found it not very usable for presenting it directly. For example, if 
> there''s a value 5.00 it will render in
> 
>   <%= text_field ''model'', ''discount_rate
%>
> 
> as "0.5E1" which is not very friendly to user. All I do is that I
write
> kind of proxy accessors (prefixing with i_) for handling these situations:
> ...
> 
> Is there a better way for handling this? Having a bunch of input fields 
> makes the model fairly bigger in size.
A simple patch to actionpack to add a :format option to text_field
and text_field_tag would be the best solution.

-- 
We develop, watch us RoR, in numbers too big to ignore.

Next to what Mark said, a member of this forum is working on an
"object rendering" solution
(Look in the archive for the thread titled "Teaching Models to Render
Themselves in the Controller"


Alain