Rails - Jul 2006 - form helpers with non-ActiveRecord objects

I have an ActiveRecord model (called Festival) that contains an array of
"FestDate" objects serialized into a sql text column of the Festival
object.
(like the Agile book first edition describes on p. 205)

The FestDate objects themselvs are not ActiveRecord objects.  (of course,
otherwise they would be in their own table...)

When working with a Festival, I would like to use various kinds of form
helpers while iterating over the various FestDate objects.  For example, I
would like to use select_hour and select_minute tags, but when I do, they
all end up having the same name.  I am supposing this is because I am not
iterating over an AR object, but one of my own creation.

Also, when I try to use the check_box helper, it does not correctly pick up
the value of boolean fields in the FestDate object.  Again, this is because
I am not working with an AR object.

Is there any way to make this work?  I suppose I could go to the trouble to
make these FestDate object into AR objects, and store them in their own
table, and setup the relationship, but it seems an awful lot of trouble...
just so the helpers will work.

If anyone has any ideas, I would be grateful.

Shelby
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Shelby Westman wrote:
> I would like to use select_hour and select_minute tags, but when I do, 
> they all end up having the same name.  I am supposing this is because I 
> am not iterating over an AR object, but one of my own creation.
Use the :prefix option to give them different names.
> Also, when I try to use the check_box helper, it does not correctly pick 
> up the value of boolean fields in the FestDate object.  Again, this is 
> because I am not working with an AR object.
You should be able to use AR helpers like check_box with your custom
FestDate objects.  Just make sure to assign each object to a view
instance variable before calling the helper. e.g.

<% @festival.fest_dates.each_with_index do |@fest_date, i| %>
<%= check_box :fest_date, :boolean_method, :index => i %>
<% end %>

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