How to have a drop down <select> field in a rails form?

You create the collection in the Contact controller -

app/controllers/contacts_controller.erb 

Adding

@providers = Provider.all.by_name

to the new, create and edit methods, using a scope for the by_name in the Provider model - app/models/provider.rb - for the ordering by name

scope by_name  order(:name)

Then in the view - app/views/contacts/_form.html.erb - you use

<%= f.collection_select :provider_id, @providers, :id, :name, include_blank: true %>

For rails forms, I also strongly recommend you look at a form builder like simple_form - https://github.com/plataformatec/simple_form - which will do all the heavy lifting.

You can take a look at the Rails documentation . Anyways , in your form :

  <%= f.collection_select :provider_id, Provider.order(:name),:id,:name, include_blank: true %>

As you can guess , you should predefine email-providers in another model -Provider , to have where to select them from .

This is a long way round, but if you have not yet implemented then you can originally create your models this way. The method below describes altering an existing database.

1) Create a new model for the email providers:
$ rails g model provider name

2) This will create your model with a name string and timestamps. It also creates the migration which we need to add to the schema with:
$ rake db:migrate

3) Add a migration to add the providers ID into the Contact:
$ rails g migration AddProviderRefToContacts provider:references

4) Go over the migration file to check it look OK, and migrate that too:
$ rake db:migrate

5) Okay, now we have a provider_id, we no longer need the original email_provider string:
$ rails g migration RemoveEmailProviderFromContacts

6) Inside the migration file, add the change which will look something like:

class RemoveEmailProviderFromContacts < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    remove_column :contacts, :email_provider
  end
end

7) Once that is done, migrate the change:
$ rake db:migrate

8) Let's take this moment to update our models:
Contact: belongs_to :provider
Provider: has_many :contacts

9) Then, we set up the drop down logic in the _form.html.erb partial in the views:

  <div class="field">
    <%= f.label :provider %><br>
    <%= f.collection_select :provider_id, Provider.all, :id, :name %>
  </div>

10) Finally, we need to add the provders themselves. One way top do that would be to use the seed file:

Provider.destroy_all

gmail = Provider.create!(name: "gmail")
yahoo = Provider.create!(name: "yahoo")
msn = Provider.create!(name: "msn")

$ rake db:seed

Or for custom options

<%= f.select :desired_attribute, ['option1', 'option2']%>