Railway Bootstrap Plugin

Railway Bootstrap is a RailwayJS plugin that will render forms for your models utilizing Twitter Bootstrap formatting and CSS classes.

Requirements:

Railway Bootstrap requires RailwayJS v2.6+. The plugin may work with earlier version of RailwayJS, but is untested.

Additionally, RailwayJS uses EJS for rendering view templates by default. While RailwayJS is capable of working with the Jade rendering engine, Railway Bootstrap has not yet been tested with Jade.

Installation:

Install the package via npm:

> npm install railway-bootstrap

The Railway-Bootstrap plugin still needs to be initialized in your RailwayJS app. In the root folder of your app, open (or create if it doesn't exist) npmfile.js, and paste the following code:

require('railway-bootstrap');

Usage:

Assume that your application has a User model with properties username, email, avatar, and description in the following example. Also assume that user is an instance of the User model (generated via new User()).

<% bootstrapFormFor(user, function (form) { %>
    <%- form.input('username') %>
    <%- form.input('email', { label: 'Email Address' }) %>
    <%- form.file('avatar') %>
    <%- form.textarea('description') %>
<% }) %>

The bootstrapFormFor helper method has two valid signatures:

bootstrapFormFor(resource, callback)
bootstrapFormFor(resource, options, callback)

The parameters are defined as follows:

resource: An instance of a model that the form will represent.
options: A simple object that includes any extra attributes you wish to define on the form, in addition to a type option that is explained in more detail below.
callback: A function that is used for defining fields within the form.

Below is a simple example of how you might use this helper method.

bootstrapFormFor(user, { action: '/users/new', method: 'put' }, function (form) { ... });

This example produces HTML like the following:

<form class="well" action="/users/new" method="post">
    <input type="hidden" name="authenticity_token" value="f46d9de27e45fef8dce10a36dcdc7be7fa8612af" />
    <input type="hidden" name="_method" value="PUT" />
    <!-- any other calls made on the form object will render here -->
</form>

When using bootstrapFormFor, the callback parameter will be provided with a form object as the only parameter. This object provides several methods that can be used for rendering form fields.

input (name, options): Creates an <input> element, where name is the name of the resource's property to render. If no options are provided, the input type defaults to "text".
textarea (name, options): Creates a <textarea> element, where name is the name of the resource's property to render.
file (name, options): Creates an <input type="file"> element, where name is the name of the resource's property to render.
submit (label, options): Creates a <button type="submit"> element, where label is the text to be rendered on the button.

Form Types

This plugin implements three of the Twitter Bootstraps form types: vertical (the default), horizontal, and inline. There are two ways to change the type of form being rendered. The first is to use the type option when calling bootstrapFormFor.

bootstrapFormFor(user, { type: 'horizontal' }, function (form) { ... });
bootstrapFormFor(user, { type: 'vertical' }, function (form) { ... });
bootstrapFormFor(user, { type: 'inline' }, function (form) { ... });

Additionally, there are helper methods provided for each of the types of forms implemented.

horizontalFormFor(user, function (form) { ... });
verticalFormFor(user, function (form) { ... });
inlineFormFor(user, function (form) { ... });

Refer to the Forms section of the Twitter Bootstrap docs for more details on and examples of form types.

Created By:

Matt Huggins

License:

Railway Bootstrap is released under the MIT license.