Question

I’m building a call tracking app, to learn rails and twilio. Right now, I have a form, that when it’s submitted, records the twilio phone number, alongside other parameters to the database, and than buys the phone number.

I had this functioning a bit back, but I changed something that broke my ability to call the parameters in the create action.

Now, when I run the code, I get the error :

Twilio::REST::RequestError in PhonesController#create

Missing PhoneNumber parameter. Please specify the phone number that you would like to purchase

Here’s the form that I submit with :

    <% @numbers.each do |number| %>

            <%= form_for(@phone) do |f| %>
                <%= f.hidden_field :original_number, :value => params[:original_number] %>



                <%= f.hidden_field :name, :value => params[:name] %>
                <%= f.hidden_field :twilio_number,  :value => number.phone_number %>

                <div class="found_list">
                    <div class="found_phone_number">
                        <%= f.label :twilio_number, number.friendly_name %>
                    </div>
                    <div class="choose_found_number">
                    <%= f.submit "Choose This Number", :class => "btn btn-large btn-success" %>
                    </div>
                </div>
                    <hr>
            <% end %>
    <% end %>

Here’s what the debugger is telling me when I hit submit :

Parameters:

{"utf8"=>"✓",
 "authenticity_token"=>"/qJ6qATbNH2pZwxDPcKGifktWtAA5WrShbqb/2+lBbE=",
 "phone"=>{"original_number"=>"6463978797",
 "name"=>"Website",
 "twilio_number"=>"[phone]"},
 "commit"=>"Choose This Number"}

And here’s my create action

  def create
    @user = current_user
    @phone = @user.phones.build(params[:phone])
    client = Twilio::REST::Client.new(@user.twilio_account_sid, @user.twilio_auth_token)
    number = client.account.incoming_phone_numbers.create({:phone_number => params[:twilio_number]})
   if @phone.save && number.true
      flash[:success] = "Phone Number Created!"
      redirect_to user_path
    else
      render new_phone_path
      flash[:error] = "It looks like there were errors with the submission"
    end
  end

If I edit the action and replace params[:twilio_number], with ‘[phone]’, than it works.

Thanks for sticking through it this far! Do you have thoughts on how I could properly call the twilio_number parameter in the controller? Or, do you think there’s some other problem?

Answer 1

I think your problem came from the wrong format of your params hash, it actually is

{
 "utf8"=>"✓",
 "authenticity_token"=>"/qJ6qATbNH2pZwxDPcKGifktWtAA5WrShbqb/2+lBbE=",
 "phone"=>{
   "original_number"=>"6463978797",
   "name"=>"Website",
   "twilio_number"=>"[phone]"
 },
 "commit"=>"Choose This Number"
}

So you can see that params[:twilio_number] doesn’t exist, what exists is params[:phone][:twilio_number]

But of course your solution works as when you’re doing

@phone = @user.phones.build(params[:phone])

you’re creating a phone instance with params[:phone] which as the :twilio_number key