What is this?

Sal (salt) is something you add to almost every meal. I add sal to my Rails projects.

I found I always add a particular set of helpers, initializers and generators. Better if they're distributed as a Rails engine.

Installation

Add to your Rails app Gemfile:

gem 'sal-engine'

And run bundle

How does it taste?

messages_bar helper

Will render:

<div class="alert alert-success">anything</div>

…if flash[:notice] contains anything.

Will render:

 <div class="alert alert-warning">anything</div>

…if flash[:alert] contains anything.

When providing both, notice will prevail.

menu_item helper

Very handy for navigation menus:

<%= menu_item 'first' %>First option<% end %>
<%= menu_item 'second', :div %><%= link_to root_path, 'Second option' %><% end %>

Renders:

<li class="active">First option<li>
<div><a href="/">Second option</a><div>

Parameters: menu_item(item, tag)

• item: item name
• tag: :li by default

errors_bar helper

Will indicate if any model in your form has an error. It supports multiple models in case you're combining two entities in the same form (i.e. using fields_for):

<%= errors_item @user %>

Renders:

 <div class="alert alert-danger">Please correct the highlighted fields.</div>

Parameters: errors_item(model[, model2…])

• model: an active record model, or tableless
• model2: you can provide more than one

The string Please correct the highlighted fields. is localized as errors_bar_message into English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. You can override this in your app if you need to, editing your locale yml files.

Error messages

I like to put the error messages right after the field in the form. sal provides an initializer that will patch ActionView::Base to wrap the field with the extra markup and the error message.

Given a model with a field:

<%= text_field_tag :title %>

that renders this simple view:

<input type="text" name="title">

Then it will add this extra HTML on an error:

<div class="has-error">
  <input type="text" name="title">
  <span class="help-block">✖ can't be blank</span>
</div>

It plays nice with Bootstrap forms. You won't have to touch any CSS.

• Plain text fields: erb <div class="form-group"> <%= f.label :password, 'Password' %> <%= f.password_field :password, :class => 'form-control' %> </div>
• Checkboxes. Use this code for proper margin and alignment: erb <div class="form-group checkbox"> <%= f.label :conditions, "#{f.check_box(:conditions)}I accept the terms and conditions".html_safe, :class => 'checkbox' %> </div>

Generators

Rails generators are very useful in the initial stages of development to create your admin interfaces. In particular:

• I use bootstrap classes for layout
• I don't use the show action/view
• I don't want to autogenerate helper files for every model

To launch this generator:

bundle exec rails generate scaffold MyModel name:string -p --skip-test-framework

Interesting, but…

It fits my purposes, which may be different from yours. You might like the idea though: then fork it and call it peppermint, curry or whatever you prefer!