Decouple Your Models with Form Objects
summary
Builds a three-step onboarding wizard for dog-walking companies and shows that form objects remove model cruft: validations live on forms, not in fat models, and nested attributes and conditional state machines disappear. Uses plain Ruby form objects with activemodel::model then refactors to use the Reform gem (Trailblazer) to get prepopulate/populator behavior, collections, and composition. Saves each step transactionally, keeps controllers RESTful, makes tests fast, and reduces boilerplate compared side‑by‑side with a hand‑rolled solution.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Start
- 12:41initializing the nested fill method
- 13:06define the properties inside the collection
- 14:36add a pre-populated method to the collection
- 17:32adding and removing addresses
- 20:15add or remove multiple addresses
- 23:31testing the form objects
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