Question

I’ve a got a form wizard of sorts in Rails 3. Basically, I create a hotel object and then when all of that is complete I want to create a location object for that hotel. My controller code for creating the hotel looks like this:

  def create
    @hotel = Hotel.new(params[:hotel])

    respond_to do |format|
      if @hotel.save
        @location = Location.new
        format.html { redirect_to '/set_location'}
      else
        format.html { render action: "new" }
      end
    end
  end

Then in the ‘/set_location’ page I have a form which sets the location. However, I’m getting an 'undefined method model_name for NilClass:Class' error on the html.erb for the @location instance variable.

This is really strange as when I use render ‘/set_location’ instead of redirect_to then it works fine. However, I want to use the redirect_to method in order to prevent duplicate record submission.

Thanks in advance for any help on this.

Answer 1

HTTP is stateless by design. If you want to share the state between requests (redirect leads to another request) you should use the session hash. Like this:

session[:hotel_id] = @hotel.id

And then you retrieve your Hotel in the /set_location this way:

Hotel.find(session[:hotel_id])