Question

I’m not sure how to search for this answer, so I’ll go ahead and ask it.

In my rails project I have a User model and a foo model. A user can have one or more foo models assigned to it. I have accomplished this by adding

has_many :foo, :through => :user_foo 

in my user model.

Now, over in my view, I want to display a list of all foos. Not just the ones that are selected (i will be making these radio buttons, but that’s another question). When I try to do this (yes, i’m using haml):

    - for foo in @foos 

I get this error:

You have a nil object when you didn't expect it! You might have expected an instance of Array. The error occurred while evaluating nil.each 

My assumption is that this is caused because the @foos collection is empty. What is the proper way to get access to this collection within my user view?

** edit **

I think my initial question was a bit confusing. the first issue i’m trying to figure out is how to access a collection of foos from within my user view. the relationship doesn’t matter. I just want a list of all foos in the system. not just the ones assigned to the user.

Answer 1

I assume that you have belongs_to :user in your Foo class?

What does your controller code look like? To show all foos it should have something like this:

def index   @foos = Foo.all end