What does f.input in a rails form do?

Question

I started to program with Rails after i finished some lessons in Ruby. When i looked at someone's code I got confused. It looked like he makes some form using Rails but I just can't understand how it works. Well just take a look on the code... Hopefully you can help me to understand this:

=f.inputs do
   =f.input :type, :as => :transmission, :label => false
   =create_submit_link('Do something',:id=>'transmit')

Now the f.input row will print me 3 rows of following stuff: (row 1): radio_button | labeltext | text_field; (row 2): 1x radio_button |labeltext| number_field; (row 3): radio_button |labeltext|

How is that possible? :O

Answer 1

f.inputs is not defined in rails. You may be using "simple-form" gem. Simple Form has various views helpers to generates html contents. It has various method such as: text , radio , email however :as => :transmission options seems to be user defined as its not defined in "simple form" also. You can take look at https://github.com/plataformatec/simple_form/blob/master/lib/simple_form/action_view_extensions/form_helper.rb . f.input work same as f.textbox or similar to rails but it has much more options than bare rails html helpers.