Question

I have a variable @products = Product.all defined inside new method in a controller. It contains values from a db table to be shown in a select box on form.

When the create method raise validation errors I am calling render :action => 'new'.

All the other variables seem to come back fine, but @products comes back as nil

What am I missing here.

Answer 1

render :action => new is asking ActionView to render the view for the new action — it does not run the new action in the current controller, as you may expect.

From http://guides.rubyonrails.org/layouts_and_rendering.html#using-render:

Using render with :action is a frequent source of confusion for Rails newcomers. The specified action is used to determine which view to render, but Rails does not run any of the code for that action in the controller. Any instance variables that you require in the view must be set up in the current action before calling render.