Question

I am trying to create two objects at the same time, but for some reason my second object’s fields are blank.

The models are:

Users: id, name, last, email, password ...
Locations: address, longitude, latitude.

The relationship so are:

User has_many location
Location belongs_to users

Event controller create method:

def create
    @event = current_users.events.build(params[:event])
    @location = @event.locations.build(params[:location])
    @location.longitude = params[:longitude]
    @location.latitude = params[:latitude]
    respond_to do |format|
      if @location.save
        @location.longitude = params[:longitude]
        @location.latitude = params[:latitude]
        if @location.save
          if @event.save
            format.html { redirect_to @event, notice: 'Event was successfully created.' }
            format.json { render json: @event, status: :created, location: @event }
          else
            format.html { render action: "new" }
            format.json { render json: @event.errors, status: :unprocessable_entity }
          end
        end
      end
    end
  end

And the form:

  <%= f.hidden_field :latitude %>
  <%= f.hidden_field :longitude %>

But when I create my locations I get blank for longitude and latitude, my event_id is filled up though. Would there be a better way to create two objects at the same time?

Answer 1

your two fields are generated using a form builder f. I suspect they are inside a form_for call. The consequences of this are that the field names will be nested in a namespace for your model. This means that params[<model name>][:longitude] and params[<model name>][:latitude] should have the content of the fields.

You can check your console to see what parameters were received by rails. Alternatively you can print the params hash to the console to inspect it’s content: p params (somewhere in your action).

So in order to get everything working you need to access the right params. (Something like params[:location][:longitude])