Obviously I have no insight into your implementation, but I"m not sure why you would "have to" declare the field on your model. There are probably a lot of different ways handle this situation. For instance, you probably don't have to use the ActionView helpers. There's nothing preventing your controller and view from just passing non-model parameters back and forth.
Rails has never made the promise of giving you every a solution for every situation in the wild right out of the box, and I don't understand why people seem to think it does. No framework could ever do that. What it does is abstract away the common stuff that makes up probably 95% of most web apps, and gives you the ability to roll the rest on your own.
Rails has never made the promise of giving you every a solution for every situation in the wild right out of the box, and I don't understand why people seem to think it does. No framework could ever do that. What it does is abstract away the common stuff that makes up probably 95% of most web apps, and gives you the ability to roll the rest on your own.