I have a two-part question about form_for and nested resources. Let's say I'm writing a blog engine and I want to relate a comment to an article. I've defined a nested resource as follows:
map.resources :articles do |articles|
articles.resources :comments
end
The comment form is in the show.html.erb view for articles, underneath the article itself, for instance like this:
<%= render :partial => "articles/article" %>
<% form_for([ :article, @comment]) do |f| %>
<%= f.text_area :text %>
<%= submit_tag "Submit" %>
<% end %>
This gives an error, "Called id for nil, which would mistakenly etc." I've also tried
<% form_for @article, @comment do |f| %>
Which renders correctly but relates f.text_area to the article's 'text' field instead of the comment's, and presents the html for the article.text attribute in that text area. So I seem to have this wrong as well. What I want is a form whose 'submit' will call the create action on CommentsController, with an article_id in the params, for instance a post request to /articles/1/comments.
The second part to my question is, what's the best way to create the comment instance to begin with? I'm creating a @comment in the show action of the ArticlesController, so a comment object will be in scope for the form_for helper. Then in the create action of the CommentsController, I create new @comment using the params passed in from the form_for.
Thanks!
Travis R is correct. (I wish I could upvote ya.) I just got this working myself. With these routes:
resources :articles do
resources :comments
end
You get paths like:
/articles/42
/articles/42/comments/99
routed to controllers at
app/controllers/articles_controller.rb
app/controllers/comments_controller.rb
just as it says at http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html#nested-resources, with no special namespaces.
But partials and forms become tricky. Note the square brackets:
<%= form_for [@article, @comment] do |f| %>
Most important, if you want a URI, you may need something like this:
article_comment_path(@article, @comment)
Alternatively:
[@article, @comment]
as described at http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html#creating-paths-and-urls-from-objects
For example, inside a collections partial with comment_item
supplied for iteration,
<%= link_to "delete", article_comment_path(@article, comment_item),
:method => :delete, :confirm => "Really?" %>
What jamuraa says may work in the context of Article, but it did not work for me in various other ways.
There is a lot of discussion related to nested resources, e.g. http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2007/2/5/nesting-resources
Interestingly, I just learned that most people's unit-tests are not actually testing all paths. When people follow jamisbuck's suggestion, they end up with two ways to get at nested resources. Their unit-tests will generally get/post to the simplest:
# POST /comments
post :create, :comment => {:article_id=>42, ...}
In order to test the route that they may prefer, they need to do it this way:
# POST /articles/42/comments
post :create, :article_id => 42, :comment => {...}
I learned this because my unit-tests started failing when I switched from this:
resources :comments
resources :articles do
resources :comments
end
to this:
resources :comments, :only => [:destroy, :show, :edit, :update]
resources :articles do
resources :comments, :only => [:create, :index, :new]
end
I guess it's ok to have duplicate routes, and to miss a few unit-tests. (Why test? Because even if the user never sees the duplicates, your forms may refer to them, either implicitly or via named routes.) Still, to minimize needless duplication, I recommend this:
resources :comments
resources :articles do
resources :comments, :only => [:create, :index, :new]
end
Sorry for the long answer. Not many people are aware of the subtleties, I think.