Question: I figured that this would be a common need, but have been unsuccessful in finding a solution. I followed this ASCIIcast by Ryan Bates <http://railscasts.com/episodes/302-in-place-editing?view=asciicast> and now have functional in place editing on my website. However, I think it is not intuitive that these records are editable at all, as they just appear as a plain text representation of the current record value until you click them. I want something so that the select dropdown shows up by default like it would in a normal form as shown in the image. Is there anyway to do this using best\_in\_place or rest\_in\_place? ![I would like to have this show all the time](https://i.stack.imgur.com/V2VIa.png)

Answer: 
I know it is not exactly the answer you are looking for but you can style the best\_in\_place values using the .best\_in\_place class.

I did something like this on my website, which helps showing that the value is editable:

```
.best_in_place {
    padding-right: 18px;
    background-image: url('*/ link to an edit icon /*');
    background-size: 15px auto;
    background-position: right center;
    background-repeat: no-repeat;
    cursor: pointer;
}

.best_in_place:hover {
  background-color:#eeeeee;
}

```
A dropdown is the default behavior for best\_in\_place if your original form input is via radio buttons. Otherwise, you can use a :colllection to at least validate the new data entry. 
e.g. in haml, updated answer must be red, green or blue:

```html
.flex1=best_in_place :color, :type => :select, :collection => (["red","blue","green"])
```