Draper VS Simple Form

So what about the world outside Rails defaults? There are quite a few independent projects trying to help build components in the Rails view layer, among the more famous being Draper (utilizing the decorators pattern) or Cells (full-featured components in views). In the end, we decided to take a deeper look into a relatively new one – the ViewComponent framework.

If you are not a big fan of writing Rails custom helpers, you can always opt-in for a View Model pattern with the Draper gem. Or you can roll your own View Model pattern here, it shouldn't be that complicated. If you are just starting out with your web app, I suggest starting slowly by writing custom helpers and if that brings pain, turn to other solutions.

The Draper gem is the one I'm familiar with which does this well, I'm sure there are others.

Don't introduce decorators and view models. Use helpers instead. Don't extract domain models. Put the code in the ActiveRecord models and the controllers. Don't reach for interactors to model your domain logic. Don't try to avoid duplication too early.

7. DRAPER

I also tend to use gems like simple_form to generate my form HTML, and this saves me from having to maintain a lot of view code to outputting translated content onto forms. Also simple_form has it's own i18n convention that compliments the Rails default pretty well.

I followed the RailsCasts tutorial and its GitHub page to set up the gem in my application and used it for all of the models in my application. It was working perfectly fine showing the default error message at the top and the validation message at the bottom of their respective fields.

Okay now for those "buttons". We don't want just a normal button or link though. This is where we need the booking update form. Let's use simple_form_for (check out the docs here).

There are many ways to create a form in Rails, whether you want to create a form with Form builder from Rails itself or maybe using third party gem like simple_form. Of course, simple_form is not the only option we have to build form in rails, there are alternatives out there such as formtastic, cocoon, nested_form, etc. However, in this post I'm going to give you a basic use case to use simple_form in Rails application.

I usually go with simple_form, I customise my forms by configuring it and letting it handle the repeated rendering.

Simple Form gem

The biggest unclear area that we saw related to view components were forms. There were glimpses of compatibility issues with Rails form helpers in the documentation and we saw a recent effort of the team to mitigate them. Moreover, we were used to building forms with Simple Form which added another variable to the equation. And, in general, we considered the Rails form builders (as well as the Simple Form builder) a system of form-related components in the first place so we were unsure how this would fit into the View Components ecosystem or whether we should even try to do that.

Learn more about simple form: 1) https://github.com/heartcombo/simple_form 2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfZk74R2Oi4&t=5s