Rails: Field names

Question

I have a User model with an 'email' field.

In my view, I have rendered the label for this field as 'Email address' as follows:

<%= form_for(:user) do |f| %>
  <%= f.label :email, 'Email address' %><br /
  <%= f.text_field :email %>
<% end %>

However, when validation errors are generated, 'Email' is used instead:

Email is invalid

Is there something I can add to the model so that :email always renders to 'Email address' rather than simply 'Email'?

Many thanks

Answer 1

You don't need to rename your table columns to do this. There's a very clean fix:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  HUMAN_ATTRIBUTE_NAMES = {
    :email => 'Email address',
    :first_name => 'First name'
  }

  class << self
    def human_attribute_name attribute_name
      HUMAN_ATTRIBUTE_NAMES[attribute_name.to_sym] || super
    end
  end
end

What we've done is create a hash of attributes where we want to customize the names. You don't have to list all of them, since many attribute names will work out of the box as you want them to. Then we override ActiveRecord's human_attribute_name method, to try to find the name in our hash first.

This does two really cool things: you no longer have to specify custom labels in your forms, and your error messages will have the new names automatically, as well! As a bonus, you can now use these names wherever you want, by calling:

<%= User.human_attribute_name(:email) %>

This creates a more unified approach to naming. If you want to change "email" to "e-mail" next week, you only have to do it in one place.

I hope this helps!

Answer 2

Expanding gjb comments, I just added this to config/initializers/inflections.rb:

ActiveSupport::Inflector.inflections do |inflect|
    inflect.human 'email', 'Email address' 
end

I think this is much neater.