simple_form_tailwind_css VS Simple Form

One option is the simple_form_tailwind_css gem by Abe Voelker, mentioned also in the GitHub issue. It uses a combination of default Tailwind styles in the Simple Form configuration with a custom form builder and a few custom inputs. The gem supports replacing the default classes related to error messages with custom ones.

The problem I have is the front end. I'm using Rails 7 with Tailwind and I'm hitting all sorts of problems. I don't need anything fancy, basically a form with few text inputs, dropdowns (single and multi-select), and numeric inputs. How do people implement these components? It seems like barely any gems support stimulus/tailwind, for example, Simple-Forms. I've found the workaround repo, but it seems more like a temp fix rather than a real solution.

I'm using the gem Simple Form for my forms. So the original form would look like this:

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.