Question

I am currently pretty stumped on this one. I recently had to update my rails application and now am seeing this error popup whenever I try to save an object that also tries to save a Visitor object. Here is the code that is failing:

if @sale.shift_id.nil?
            @sale.update_attribute(:shift_id,session[:shift_id])
            @title = "New Sale"
            @sale = Sale.new
            @products = Product.order("name")
            @shifts = Shift.order("starttime")

#this line below is line 51, which the output says is the failing line.
            Visitor.new(:gender => 'Other', :shift_id => session[:current_shift_id], :reason_id => Reason.find_by_name("Products")).save

            redirect_to(newsale_path, :notice => 'successfully added the sale')
        else

The error I get is:

undefined method `to_i' for #<Reason:0x56f5848>
Rails.root: 

Application Trace | Framework Trace | Full Trace
app/controllers/sales_controller.rb:51:in `new'
app/controllers/sales_controller.rb:51:in `create'

At first I thought it might be the Reason.find_by_name, so I replaced that with a valid integer value and it still failed. The only other bit of code that I can see that might fail is the routes.rb, which has an entry under:

match 'newsale', :to => 'sales#newsale'

Lastly, the output to the webrick is confusing because it actually shows the sql calls saving the @sale object, and then I get the following lines:

SELECT "reasons".* FROM "reasons" WHERE "reasons"."name" = 'Products' LIMIT 1
Completed 500 Internal Server Error in 104ms

Answer 1

:reason_id => Reason.find_by_name("Products") here Rails is trying to cast the found Reason instance to an integer value to set as the :reason_id attribute on Visitor by calling .to_i on it (which doesn’t exist).

You need to tell Rails where the id is by changing

Reason.find_by_name("Products")

to

Reason.find_by_name("Products").id

You can alternatively define a to_i method on Reason and leave your action as-is.

alias_method :to_i, :id