Question

I’m working on an app that does some web scraping. In the sites model, I’ve got this method:

  def download_meta_tags
    downloaded_tags = Nokogiri::HTML(Net::HTTP.get(self.domain, "/")).xpath("//meta[@name='robots']")
    downloaded_tags.each do |t|
      self.robots_tags.tag << t
    end
  end

The sites model has many robots_tags through a join table called robots_tag_sites. The sites model also accepts_nested_attributes_for :robots_tags. The method above is meant to take all the tags that get downloaded in line 1 of the method and save them off to the tags column of the robots_tags table.

I think the problem is that “self.robots_tags” still grabs a collection of things instead of one individual thing. But I’m not sure how to add the tag correctly. Any advice?

(BTW, these is a follow up from another post, Rails app has trouble with inter-model saving)

Answer 1

You should be using self.robots_tags.create(...) to create a new RobotTag object.

Assuming your RobotTag has a tag attribute, it might look something like this:

downloaded_tags.each do |t|
  self.robot_tags.create(:tag => t)
end