Question

I am using Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 2.3.5

So I am trying to figure out why my has_many association doesn’t work properly. I have 2 tables in the database, Videos and Comments. Inside the Comments table I have a foreign key of video_id column and when posting a comment nothing shows up on my video’s page because the video_id column is NULL so nothing got posted.. If I add the id of the video in the video_id column, you can view the comment. Am I missing something?

Video.rb

class Video < ActiveRecord::Base
 has_many :comments
end

Comment.rb

class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base  
 belongs_to :video
end

comments_controller.rb

  def create
    @comment = Comment.new(params[:comment])
    @comment.video_id = params[:video_id]    

    if @comment.save
      flash[:notice] = 'Your comment was saved!'
    else
      flash[:notice] = 'Sorry, there was a problem.'
    end

    redirect_to videos_path
  end

_form.html.erb

    <% form_for :comment, :url => comments_path(@video) do |f| %>

    <p>
      <%= f.label :name, "Your Name" %>
      <%= f.text_field :name %>  
    </p>
    <p>
      <%= f.label :body, "Your Comment" %>
      <%= f.text_field :body %>
    </p>
    <p>
      <%= f.submit "Submit", :disable_with => 'Submiting...' %>
    </p>


    <% end -%>

Routes.rb

    ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map|

      map.index     '/',                          :controller => 'homepage', :action => 'index'
      map.logout    '/logout',                    :controller => 'sessions', :action => 'destroy'
      map.signout   '/signout',                   :controller => 'sessions', :action => 'destroy'
      map.login     '/login',                     :controller => 'sessions', :action => 'new'
      map.signin    '/signin',                    :controller => 'sessions', :action => 'new'
      map.register  '/register',                  :controller => 'users',    :action => 'create'
      map.signup    '/signup',                    :controller => 'users',    :action => 'new'
      map.activate  '/activate/:activation_code', :controller => 'users',    :action => 'activate', :activation_code => nil
      map.resources :users 
      map.resource  :session
      map.resources :comments
      map.resources :videos

      map.connect ':controller/:action/:id'
      map.connect ':controller/:action/:id.:format'

    end

Answer 1

You’re not specifying params[:video_id] correctly.

From what I can tell you want to allow users to comment on videos?

If so, I believe the real routing structure you want is:

resources :videos do
  resources :comments
end

This will make a path like video_comments_path(@video) which you can POST to and in the create action do something like:

  @video = Video.find(params[:video_id])
  @comment = @video.comments.create(params[:comment])

Thats basically it