Order select tag entries alphabetically and group by first letter in Rails

Select tags with many options can soon get confusing. Sorting them alphabetically and grouping the entries by their first letter is an easy solution.

How to

Assuming you want to group and sort an Account model by its name attribute:

Controller

@accounts_alphabetical = Account.order(:name)
  .collect{ |account| [account.name, account.id] }
  .group_by{ |account| account.first[0,1].upcase }

The last line groups by each accounts .name (.first) starting letter ([0,1]) and only if its unique of course. So @accounts_alphabetically is a Hash where the keys are the letters which was grouped by and the values are Arrays that contain the Accounts IDs and names.

View

<%= form_for @person do |f| %>
  <%= f.select :id, grouped_options_for_select(@accounts_alphabetical), { include_blank: 'Choose Account:' } %>
  …
<% end %>