Question

I’ve got a User model that has many Items. A Rating belongs to a User and an Item.

In the DB, I have set ratings.user_id to be not NULL.

when I am creating an Item, I would like to do this:

  def create     current_user.items.create(params[:item]).ratings.create(params[:rating]     redirect_to items_path   end 

However, this balks with an SQL error ‘user_id cannot be nil’

so I rewrote the create method as

  def create     current_user.items.create(params[:item]).ratings.create(params[:rating].merge({:user_id => current_user}))     redirect_to items_path   end  

which works fine.

However, I had thought that chaining the create methods off the current user’s receiver would have populated the rating’s user_id. Anyone know why not?

TIA.

Answer 1

I’d recommend you normalize this if possible in the database. Maybe take out the user_id attribute from the ratings table and if you need it in your model get it through a join using a :through method

class Rating     has_many :items     has_one :user, :through=>:items