WWR - Railsplugin: Human Attribute Override

Human Attribute Override

Read a tutorial for this plugin at http://weblog.redlinesoftware.com/2008/1/2/human-attribute-override-plugin-tutorial

Updates

Nov. 14, 2007

Fixed a bug where column.human_name didn’t use the new attribute name.

This should now produce the correct results:

<% for column in Company.content_columns %> <%= column.human_name %> <% end %>

Aug. 18, 2007

Attributes can now be specified with symbols or strings (only strings were accepted before) ex. attr_human_name :num_employees => ‘Number of employees’, ‘unit_num’ => ‘Unit#’

Attributes can also be accessed with symbols or strings ex. Company.human_attribute_name(‘num_employees’) 'Number of employees' Company.human_attribute_name(:num_employees) ‘Number of employees’

After Rails 1.2, the method human_attribute_name will be removed, so this must be implemented as a plugin to keep the method and it’s existing uses of the method intact, while adding additional functionality described below.

This plugin allows humanized versions of attributes to be overridden with custom strings to provide a better conversion than humanize may provide.

This is useful in error reporting and possibly legacy databases where more “cryptic” field names may be used in database tables and a humanized version is not very human.

Rails uses these humanized conversions in error reporting with the error_messages_for method and in schema definitions for column names with the human_name method.

For example, a table (Company) has a field called num_employees which when humanized becomes ‘Num employees’ using the human_attribute_name method (which currently equates to a humanize method call). Ex.

Company.human_attribute_name(‘num_employees’) == ‘Num employees’

With this patch you can override this conversion…

class Company attr_human_name ‘num_employees’ => ‘Number of employees’ ... end

Now the following is true…

Company.human_attribute_name(‘num_employees’) == ‘Number of employees’