Upgrading to Formtastic 2.0

I have been using Formtastic 1.2 for the Radio NZ site rebuild. I have a number of custom input types, customised via extending SemanticFormBuilder and adding my own methods. Justin outlined the changes a few months ago.

Formtastic 2.0 RC just got released, and Justin points out:

Folks who subclassed SemanticFormBuilder and created their own custom inputs as methods will be in for some pain.

OK, I have been through the pain, and it wasn't so bad. Here is what I did:

1. Changed all instances of Formtastic::SemanticFormBuilder in the formtastic initializer file to Formtastic::FormBuilder.

2. Remove the custom builder declaration in the config file

3. Moved my old custom methods into a module.

(I added include FormtasticExtensions to the top of the initializer file.)

4. Converted my methods to classes.

I have posted a gist of the converted module with the old methods below the new classes.

You should also change the setting of all_fields_required_by_default to false if you did not have it set before, otherwise you'll find that forms that once saved will have HTML5 warnings for all fields. The other gotcha is that validates_length_of without validates_presence_of in the model makes the field required. This might not be what you expect!

My impression of the update is good. This custom code is a lot simpler, and less hackery is required to get what you want.

I found one issue I am still working on fixing - new forms that use the CK Editor for text areas won't save. This happens if the field is required. CK Editor does not write any content to the text area, so the form won't save. A work-around is to mark the field as :required => false and rely on the server-side validation to display the error to the user after trying to save.

Hopefully this helps others with their transition to 2.0.