Question

I have a bit of an odd issue. I have a projects controller where I am creating a new project related to a company and created by the logged in user (current_user), here is my create action.

def create
  @project = @company.projects.build(params[:project].merge!(:user => current_user))
  #@project.user = current_user
  if @project.save
    #debugger
    flash[:notice] = "Project has been created."
    redirect_to [@company, @project]
  else
    flash[:alert] = "Project has not been created."
    render :action => "new"
  end
end

The above code breaks on the redirect to the project show page with the following error:

undefined method `email’ for nil:NilClass

%b
  Created by
  = @project.user.email # <-- errors, not sure why

So I know everything else is saving except the user who created that project. If I remove the .merge! in my create method and do it in two steps it works perfectly fine, like so:

def create
  @project = @company.projects.build(params[:project])
  @project.user = current_user
  ....

How come using merge! would not work? I would have thought that merging the user into the object would be perfectly fine. What is the right (or preferred) way to go about this?

Thanks

Answer 1

I’ve figured it out. It was a mass assignment issue. I had attr_accessible :title, :description, :account_number, :account_executive in my code, disabled it to allow mass assignment and it worked fine.