Question

My ‘create’ function in my ‘Message’ controller is something like this:

  def create
    @message = Message.new(params[:message])
    @message2 = Message.new(params[:message])
    @message.sender_deleted = false
    @message2.sender_deleted = true    
    if @message2.save
       ...
    else
        logger.debug("SAVE DIDN'T WORK")

For whatever reason, message2 cannot be saved, but @message can. I believe this is because you need to save only a variable named @message, but I can’t figure out how to get around this. I need to, on this save, save multiple things to the database – is there some other way to do this or am I doing this completely wrong?

Thanks for your help

Answer 1

There’s no reason you can’t save more than once in an action, though why you’d want to do such a thing is debatable. You’ll want to put the saves in a transaction so you only save when both records are valid. save! will raise an exception when the save fails.

def create
  @message = Message.new(params[:message].merge(:sender_deleted=>false))
  @message2 = Message.new(params[:message].merge(:sender_deleted=>true))
  Message.transaction do
    @message.save!
    @message2.save!
  end
  redirect_to .... # handle success here
rescue ActiveRecord::RecordNotSaved, ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid
    # do what you need to deal with failed save here,
    # e.g., set flash, log, etc.
    render :action => :new
  end
end