Following in the Rails tradition, I created a simple solution to a problem I needed to solve, and I thought I’d extract it and share.

Here’s the scenario. You’ve got some simple tabular data. Some examples: order line items, flight status info, widget inventory, players on your corporate softball team. And you need a quick and dirty form to CRUD that data.

The datalist\_for plugin helps you do just that. Inspired by the excellent invoice line-item thingy in Blinksale, datalist\_for creates a table of data, complete with inline editing, and ajaxy create and delete. The resulting markup is very simple, and can be easily styled to suit your needs.

Usage

After installing the plugin, just include DatalistFor in your controller, and drop the datalist\_for tag into your form. So, your complete form might look like:

<%= form_tag "save" %>
  <%= datalist_for :monkeys, Monkey.find(:all) %>
  <%= submit_tag "Save" %>
<%= end_form_tag %>

This will spit out a fully editable page of your favorite pet monkeys (and who doesn’t have pet monkeys). Then, in the target action of your form, do a save\_datalist to save the data. An example:

def save
  save_datalist
  flash[:notice] = "Your monkeys have been saved." 
  redirect_to :action => 'whatever'
end

You can also specify a subset of your model data:

<%= datalist_for :monkeys, Monkey.find_all_by_user_id(1), :create_with => { :user_id => 1 } %>

This will give you only monkeys for User 1. And any new monkeys will belong to User 1.

Other options:

<%= datalist_for :monkeys, Monkey.find_all_by_user_id(1), { :create_with => { :user_id => 1 },
                                    :show_header => false,
                                    :add_text => "Add a new monkey",
                                    :exclude => [:likes_bananas, nickname],
                                    :delete_content => image_tag "trash" } %>

This means:

• Don’t show the header row
• Use “Add a new monkey” as the link text for adding a new record (defaults to “Add modelname“)
• Exclude the :likes_bananas and :nickname columns
• Will use “trash.png” for row deletion instead of the default “Delete” text

ruby script\plugin install http://luckymonk.com/svn/repos/datalist_for