Question

I have a User class defined like this

class User
end

And I have sublassed this to create an Owner class and created a has_one relationship with another Company class

class Owner < User
  has_one :company
end

class Company
  belongs_to :owner
end

In my Users controller when creating a new User I want to accomplish the following:

1. Create a new User
2. Create a new Company
3. Associate the User with the Company (as the Owner i.e. company.owner_id)

I can accomplish this with the following code (simplified for brevity)

def create
  @user = User.new(params[:user])
  @company = Company.new(params[:company])

  if @user.save
    @company.owner_id = @user.id
    @company.save
    ...

Now, this just feels ugly to me, but I can’t seem to get the whole build_asociation process to work as expected (yes, fields are there in both dev and test).

What should I be doing here?

Answer 1

If you need to create Owner and Company at the same time, I suggest you use accepts_nested_attributes_for in Owner. Here’s the code:

class Owner < User
  has_one :company
  accepts_nested_attributes_for :company
end

Then in your controller you can do something like this:

def create
  @user = User.new(params[:user]) # should it be User or Owner?
  @user.company_attributes = params[:company] # assume two separate forms for User and Company
  # if you use fields_for, however, company attributes are nested under params[:user] automatically.

  if @user.save
    # do your job here
  end
end

For complete reference, please take a look at Active Record Nested Attributes and the view helper fields_for