Question

I am trying to build a form for my users where they can enter up to 3 addresses for themselves. After an address is created, it can be marked as inactive and won’t count toward the 3. I am using accepts_nested_attributes_for :addresses in my User model and I’ve tried a few things in my form, but I can’t get fields_for to show existing addresses and new addresses when the existing addresses are scoped.

These are a few things I’ve tried:

In the controller:
(3 - @user.addresses.active.count).times { @user.addresses.build }

This gives me all of the existing, active addresses but no new ones:

<%= f.fields_for :addresses, @user.addresses.active do |address| %>
  <%= address.text_field :line_1 %>
<% end %>

This gives me existing and new addresses, but it includes the inactive ones:

<%= f.fields_for :addresses do |address| %>
  <%= address.text_field :line_1 %>
<% end %>

Is there a way to combine these to get new AND scoped records?

Answer 1

From what I have found it isn’t possible to explicitly change the scope and show fields for new records by changing the parameters passed to fields_for.

But what ended up solving my problem is the fact that when passing a symbol to fields_for (for example: fields_for :addresses) the default scope of the model is going to be used. So I set default_scope where(:status => 'active') on my address model and now fields_for will only show the fields for active addresses and the fields for new addresses.

I also needed to sort these addresses by the date they were created. This was possible by changing the default sort on the has_many :addresses relation in the user model. So while it doesn’t seem there is a way to explicitly state what scopes to use in the parameters for fields_for, there are ways around it. If anyone can explain how to do this I will gladly mark that answer as correct.