Question

I’m working with Rails to create a form. I am not dealing with a single instance of a model so I know I can’t use form_for. I am thus using form_tag. I would like to create several check boxes (using check_box_tag) inside of an each iterator, then finish things off with a submit button. So my view looks like:

<tbody>
<% form_tag ('/placeBids') do # placeBids controller and route setup correctly%>

  <% @auctions.each do |auction| %>
    <tr>
    <td>....
    <td>....
    <td><%= check_box_tag auction.product # sets check box id to product name%></td>
   </tr>
  <% end # end auction.each do%>
  </tbody>
</table>

<div style="float: right;">
    <%= submit_tag 'Submit' %>
</div>

<% end # end form_for %>

Now this works, in that I can visit my page and hitting the submit button triggers my controller action. However, when I try to test this w/ Capybara:

let(:bid) {"Submit"}
   describe "when bidding on single auction =>"  do
                @auctions = Auction.all
                @auctions.each do |auction|
                    it "should increase the price of a checked auction '#{auction.product}' by $1." do
                        check (auction.product)
                        expect {click_button bid}.to change {auction.price}.by(1)
                    end

I get an error:

Failure/Error: expect {click_button bid}.to change {auction.price}.by(1)
     NoMethodError:
       undefined method `node_name' for nil:NilClass

I’d heard of people getting this error if their submit_tag wasn’t in the right place. However, I’m pretty sure I’ve got things setup. So, is it even possible to create FormTagHelpers inside of an iterator? If so, any guess what I’m doing wrong?

Answer 1

I found the problem:

Because I declare the start of the form INSIDE the table, when I close the table it automatically closes the form. So, my submit_tag is outside of the form. As soon as I move the form_tag ‘above’ the table declaration it works fine.

I didn’t expect HTML to work this way =(