A natural consequence of managing many-to-many relationships is the need to provide usable controls to select items. With the JMdict alone we will have 130,000 Japanese entries that can be added to any number of vocabulary lists. While Rails provides a drop-down list, having all 130,000 is not only usable, it will more than likely crash your web browser the moment you click on it: not the user-experience we are seeking.
Our solution is this problem is to leverage Lance Levy‘s excellcent RecordSelect. This project provides a fully AJAX’d solution to showing any number of entries in a searchable way. While the current RecordSelect is not out-of-the-box suitable for use with ActiveScaffold, a little of tender love eventually got the two working together. At this point, integration is nominally complete albeit there is still room for greater usability. However, I believe we have a great start to ensuring that you can manage your vocabulary lists easily.
