Using forms and templating

[qedi-r]

I've been trying to use forme to do mostly assist with my template generation, with erb and sinatra, but not necessarily completely replace it. For simplicity, I want to create a forme as well as easily mix some display tags in where appropriate. I've looked at the demosite, and I see that the examples look like this:

<% form(Album.last, form_attr, form_opts) do |f| %>
   <%= f.input(:name) %>
   <hr>
  <%= f.button(:value=>'Update Album') %>
<% end %>

What I'm not clear about is how the <form></form> tags are added to the erb template. Is there some erb magic going on here? Where does the form's to_s get inserted? When I do similar things in sinatra, the form before/after and form tags aren't outputted, which makes sense to me given you haven't output anything from the form. And rightly so, if you do this:

<% form_obj = form(Album.last, form_attr, form_opts) do |f| %>
  <%= f.input(:name) %>
  <hr>
  <%= f.button(:value=>'Update Album') %>
<% end %>
<%= form_obj %>

you'd see the labels twice, as they're both outputted when they're included in erb template, as well as added to the form's to_s, but the extra tags are not added, so I'd expect to see
<input><input><form><input><hr><input></form>

I can work around this by always doing everything explicitly, and doing something special to generate the form tags, and use the before and after. I just feel like I'm missing something between the way form handles the block.

[jeremyevans]

For the Roda and Sinatra integrations, the form method directly appends the <form>/</form> (and potentially other tags) to the internal instance variable used for storing template output code (@_out_buf).

If you are using Roda, you can consider using the forme_erubi_capture_block plugin, which supports erubi's capture_block engine, so you can do (note the use of <%= form:

<%= form(Album.last, form_attr, form_opts) do |f| %>
   <%= f.input(:name) %>
   <hr>
  <%= f.button(:value=>'Update Album') %>
<% end %>

For Sinatra, there isn't such an integration, though I wouldn't be opposed to including such support if it was submitted in a pull request.

[qedi-r]

Ah, ok. Thanks! At least it sounds like I'm understanding what I'm supposed to with that statement now.

FWIW, I tried the regular erb extension and didn't get anywhere with it (it just seemed to loop between template.rb lines 69 and 88). I'll stick with my explicit mode for now and investigate a proper Sinatra capture at some point in the future.