Question

I am dealing with a very simple RESTful Rails application. There is a User model and I need to update it. Rails coders like to do:

if @user.update_attributes(params[:user])
...

And from what I understand about REST, this URL request should work:

curl -d "first_name=tony&last_name=something2&v=1.0&_method=put" http://localhost:3000/users/1.xml

However, it’s quite obvious that will not work because each URL parameter will be parsed to the variable “params” and not “params[:user]”

I have a hackish fix for now, but I wanted to know how people usually handle this.

Thanks

Answer 1

It’s just a matter of how Rails parses parameters. You can nest parameters in a hash using square brackets. Something like this should work:

curl -d "user[first_name]=tony&user[last_name]=something2&v=1.0&_method=put" http://localhost:3000/users/1.xml

This should turn into

{:user=>{:last_name=>"something", :first_name=>"tony"}}

in your params hash. This is how Rails form helpers build the params hash as well, they use the square brackets in the form input tag name attribute.