Question

My question involves a few different active records

class Respondent < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :phone_numbers, :dependent => :destroy has_many :email_addresses, :dependent => :destroy belongs_to :phone_number, :foreign_key=> 'primary_phone_id' belongs_to :email_address, :foreign_key=> 'primary_email_id' end  class User < Respondent end  class EmailAddress < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :respondent has_one :respondent end 

The schema for these tables are

create_table 'email_addresses', :force => true do |t|   t.string   'email'   t.integer  'respondent_id' end  create_table 'respondents', :force => true do |t|   t.string   'first_name'   t.string   'last_name'   t.integer  'primary_email_id'   t.integer  'primary_phone_id'   t.string   'type' end 

What I am trying to accomplish is to have the respondents, and therefore users, capable of having multiple email address but only one primary. For this reason the email record and respondents record link to one another. All of the email address are stored in the email_address record and reference the respondent, and the respondent record has an id to only one email.

In the UserController the following code fails

def create     @user = User.new(params[:user])     @primary_email = EmailAddress.new(params[:primary_email])     User.transaction do       @user.primary_email = @primary_email  <=Undefined Method primary_email=       @user.save!       @primary_email.save!       redirect_to :action => :show, :id => @user     end end 

First, is this even possible what I am doing? How can I modify the code to make this controller code work?

Answer 1

Yes, you just need Respondent to have as associated primary email:

has_one :primary_email, :class_name => 'EmailAddress'