Creating your own tag helper in Rails

Lets say you get sick and tired of writing this in your views:

<div class="field">
  <%=form.label :location %>
  <%=form.text_field :location %>
</div>

and instead you would like to write

my_great_input_helper(form, "location")

how would you do it?

First you create a helper module. This could be named anything (as long as config.action_controller.include_all_helpers = true which is the default. If you turn it off (false) you will opnly have access to the helpers named after your own controller.  So UserHelpers module is available in UserController and User views, but TagHelper module is not.)

module TagsHelper
  def my_great_input_helper(form, name)
    ("<div class='field'>" +
    form.label(name.to_s) +
    form.text_field(name.to_s) +
    "</div>").html_safe
  end
end

<%=my_great_input_helper form, "adr1" %>

<%=my_great_input_helper form, :adr1 %>