Ruby on Rails

Note: I am using Rails 2.3.10.

Normally, you can use Rails' I18n system to generate label text.

For example, suppose you have a Person class with a name attribute. And this ERB:
<%= form_for @person do |f| %>
<%= f.label :name %>
<%= f.text_field :name %>
<% end %>

And you'd construct your en.yml like so:
en:
helpers:
label:
name: "your name"

However, this doesn't work very well with related objects and accepts_nested_attributes_for. Suppose you have the same Person class as before. And person has_many :activities (likewise, activity belongs_to :person) and accepts_nested_attributes_for :activities.

Now your ERB looks like this:
<%= form_for @person do |f| %>
<%= f.label :name %>
<%= f.text_field :name %>
<% f.fields_for :activities do |a| %>
<%= l.label :difficulty %>
<%= l.text_field :difficulty %>
<% end %>
<% end %>

Various combinations indentation of person / activities / difficulty in my en.yml file didn't work. So I looked inside rails to see what's going on.

The relevant code is in actionpack-2.3.10/lib/action_view/helpers/form_helper.rb. The method used is
def to_label_tag(text = nil, options = {})
on line 758.

And the code doing the work is:
content = if text.blank?
i18n_label = I18n.t("helpers.label.#{object_name}.#{method_name}", :default => "")
i18n_label if i18n_label.present?
else
text.to_s
end

The problem is you end up with a set of labels like:
helpers.label.person[activities_attributes][0].difficulty
helpers.label.person[activities_attributes][1].difficulty
helpers.label.person[activities_attributes][2].difficulty

Is there a way you can put wildcards in YAML? If not, is there some other way around this limitation? If not, this seems like a bug in Rails, and I'll file a lighthouse ticket.

Paul