Question

I think I may be missing something here or my understanding of rails model association isnt quite there yet (still learning). I have two models, a recipe and a ingredient. A recipe has many ingredients, and when i fill my form in i want to post recipe and ingredient params to their respective dbs

Recipe Model

 class Recipe < ActiveRecord::Base

 attr_accessible :dish_name, :country_of_origin, :difficulty, :preperation_time
 has_many :ingredients

 end

Ingredients Model

 class Ingredient < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :recipe
attr_accessible :ingredients
end

recipe controller

 def new 

 @recipe = Recipe.new

 end

 def create

 @recipe = Recipe.new(params[:recipe])
 if @recipe.valid?
 @recipe.save
 redirect_to recipes_path, :notice => "Recipe sucessfully created."
 else
 flash.now.alert = "Please ensure all fields are filled in."
 render :new

 end
end

Ingredients Controller

  def new
  @ingredient = recipes.find(params[:recipes_id].ingredients.new
  @recipe_id = params[:recipe_id]
  end

Form

<%= form_for @recipe  do |f| %>

<%= f.label :dish_name, "Dish Name" %>
<%= f.text_field :dish_name, :placeholder => "Enter Dish Name" %>

more fields here(wanted to keep as short as poss)

<%= f.label :ingredients, "Ingredients" %>
<%= f.text_field :ingredients , :class => :ingred, :placeholder => "Enter Ingredient Here" %><br>
<% end %>

Apologies for the size of the code, is anything else needed to see why i cannot create a recipe?

Answer 1

To start with, does your Ingredient model include a foreign key column like “recipe_id”?

Also, if the ingredients for a given recipe are just stored in a single text string, why not just make that a column in your recipe model instead of creating a second model? Alternatively, if you are going to have multiple ingredients tied to a single recipe, you should look into forms with nested model attributes. There’s a good rails cast on it here.

Hope this helps.