Question

I have a table structure that uses a link table to relate Jobs to People, the link table contains data information for how long a person was at a particular job.

I have a simple rails application that is trying to get all jobs and display the job’s employment date ranges.

class Employment < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :person
  belongs_to :job
end

class Job < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :employer
  has_many :employment

  accepts_nested_attributes_for :employment
end

def index
  @jobs = Job.joins(:employment).find(:all)
end

Now when i try to access properties ’employment_started’/ended I get a ‘NoMethodError in Experience#index’

undefined method `employment_started' for #<Class:0x000000026927e0>

17:     <span><%=job.employment.employment_started%> - <%=job.employment.to_yaml%>

When I use the ‘to_yaml’ function I can see there is data in the object:

!ruby/object:Employment attributes: job_id: 1 person_id: 1 employment_started: 2008-04-21 employment_ended: attributes_cache: {} changed_attributes: {} destroyed: false marked_for_destruction: false new_record: false previously_changed: {} readonly: false

Why can’t rails access this 3’rd level attribute?

Answer 1

When you have a “has_many” relationship , you receive an array. So basically.

Plus, It should be has_one :employment or has_many :employments

if it is a has_many relationship then you can iteration through the employments array to get the desired result