title: Using best_in_place gem how do I specify a nil value for a select tag?
body: <p>The answer on <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5589652/rails-3-best-in-place-editing">this question</a> has provided me with a nice roadmap for how to generate select tags with data from a collection on an association.</p>
  
  <p>This works nicely and everything is going great.</p>
  
  <p>The issue I have now is, how do I handle an empty collection?</p>
  
  <p>With the regular <code>:type =&gt; :input</code>, I can just specify <code>:nil =&gt; "Some nil message here"</code>.</p>
  
  <p>But that doesn't seem to work for the collection, and to make matters worse, when there is nothing in the collection it seems to be displaying some integers (i.e. <code>1</code> and <code>2</code>). I am assuming those are the IDs from the previously displayed objects in the collection, but for obvious reasons that doesn't make much sense.</p>
  
  <p>Any ideas on how I can handle an empty collection with this gem?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Edit 1:</strong></p>
  
  <p>One alternative is to just put my original <code>best_in_place</code> helper tag inside an <code>if</code> statement for when a collection is not nil. But then how does the user edit it when it is blank? Perhaps there may be no way to handle this, because it would involve creating a new record in the collection.</p>