What really did annoy me with Rails was the lack of default support for has_many and has_and_belongs_to_many (habtm) relations in the gui.

The usual solution is to use a select-box with the option multiple => true (with a kind of awkward syntax). But if you have more than just a handful of options, say more than 10, this really becomes unhandy. You need to option-click (Ctrl on Windows) to select more than one option. Hardly any ordinary user gets this the first time.

If you have to scroll down a long list you never see the already selected options or if you incidentally deselected the other options (which always happens to me).

A more intuitive solution (which exists in other gui frameworks) is to present two select boxes, one for all available options and one for the selected options, and the opportunity to move options from one select box to the other. I call this control a SwapSelect and built this so you can use this for any Rails project.

(weiterlesen…)