Simplify Your Rails App with Tooltips: A Step-by-Step Tutorial

Greeting

Hey guys, how've you been? It's AC, Alexandre Calaça here. Hope you enjoy this new article.

By the way, I would be glad to receive your feedback about it.

Introduction

I know that the tooltip we're going to be talking about is not the one in the cover image. Oh yeah!

This article Simplify Your Rails App with Tooltips: A Step-by-Step Tutorial is focused on the simplest way to create a tooltip in a Ruby on Rails application.

It's important to remember that there are several options, but we're going to focus on the easiest and simplest way.

So, just to make sure we're on the same page, this article is not going to cover how to create a tooltip with Javascript.

A tooltip is a graphical user interface element that displays additional information or a hint about a specific element when the user hovers over it or clicks on it.

It is usually displayed as a small pop-up box with text, but can also contain images or other media. Tooltips are commonly used in web applications, desktop software, and mobile apps to provide users with additional information about buttons, icons, links, and other interactive elements.

They can be very helpful in guiding users and improving the user experience.

Options

There are different ways to add a tooltip to a Rails application.

In order to get the best possibilities or customization, we would need to use a JavaScript library or pure JavaScript, however we're going to use a simple html attribute.

`title` attribute

In HTML, the title attribute is used to provide additional information about an element (such as a link or an image) when the user hovers over it with their mouse. The text specified in the title attribute will appear in a small tooltip next to the element.

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Rails Forms

title attribute can be used in various forms in Rails, including Simple Form and Form For.

In Simple Form, you can add a title attribute to an input field by passing it as an option to the input method. So, the tooltip will be available when a user hovers over the input field.

You can also use the title attribute in other forms in Rails, such as the default form builder or any custom form builders you may have implemented. Simply add the attribute to the input tag as follows.

Coding time

This is an example of the usage in a select with form_for

<div class="form-group selecting col-md-4 col-sm-4 col-xs-12">
    <%= f.label "Workflow creation",
                title:  "Enable creation of new  workflows" %>

    <%= f.select :allow_new_workflow_creation,
              {t("helpers.boolean.false_value") => false,
              t("helpers.boolean.true_value") => true},
              {},
              {:class => 'span12'} %>
</div>

You should see something like this

Take a look at one example with simple_form

<%= simple_form_for @post do |f| %>
  <%= f.input :title, title: "Enter a title for your post" %>
  <%= f.button :submit %>
<% end %>

Testing time

This is the example after adding a tooltip by using the title attribute.

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Summary

In this article, we showed how to use the html title attribute to use tooltips in Ruby on Rails applications.

We noticed that this implementation can be used in different form helpers in Rails.

Celebrate

You rock. You just learned something new. Celebrate!

Conclusion

That's all for today. Thanks for reading the article Simplify Your Rails App with Tooltips: A Step-by-Step Tutorial.

I hope this article helped you. Let me know if you have any questions.

Your thoughts, suggestions and corrections are more than welcome.

By the way, feel free to drop your suggestions on new blog articles.

Hope to see you next time.

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