Question

I’m currently going through the RoR guides, and i’m stuck at…

“Adding following/follower relationships to the sample data.”

Here’s the code that is suppose to work: sample_app/lib/task/sample_data.rake

namespace :db do
desc "Fill database with sample data"
task populate: :environment do
    make_users
    make_microposts
    make_relationships
  end
end

def make_users
 admin = User.create!(name:     "Example User2",
                     email:    "[e-mail]",
                     password: "foobar",
                     password_confirmation: "foobar")
admin.toggle!(:admin)
99.times do |n|
 name  = Faker::Name.name
 email = "example-#{n+1}@railstutorial.org"
 password  = "password"
 User.create!(name:     name,
              email:    email,
              password: password,
              password_confirmation: password)
  end
end

def make_microposts
  users = User.all(limit: 6)
  50.times do
    content = Faker::Lorem.sentence(5)
    users.each { |user| user.microposts.create!(content: content) }
  end
end

def make_relationships
  users = User.all
  user  = users.first
  followed_users = users[2..50]
  followers      = users[3..40]
  followed_users.each { |followed| user.follow!(followed) }
  followers.each      { |follower| follower.follow!(user) }
end

when i do rake db:reset my database reset with no problems.

when i do rake db:populate an error occurred stating this:

 rake aborted!
 Validation failed: Follower can't be blank`

so i checked my database, and all tables were populated except for “relationships” table.. any thoughts or suggestions? I’m pretty sure there’s a problem with the code, def making_relationships, to be exact. hope anyone has a solution to this..

-Marc

Answer 1

Since you’re calling .create! on models like User and Micropost (user.microposts), it is one of them throwing the error mentioned.

Please, post the code for these models to enable us answer more specifically.

You can still debug the problem by yourself though. Just hit rails c in the projects root directory, and try to create instances with the very same attributes you’re trying in rake task:

$ rails c

$ user = User.create!(name:     name,
                      email:    email,
                      password: password,
                      password_confirmation: password)

$ micropost = user.microposts.create!(content: "Hello, cruel world!")

# by this step you should already see some errors raised; if that's not sufficient,
# call the following methods to figure out what model suffers the validation error
user.errors.full_messages
micropost.errors.full_messages

Anyway, it’s the validation that’s not satisfied. Double check you’re passing all required attributes passed when creating a model with a shebang create!. Specifically check which model requires presence of Follower (whatever that is).