Question

My question is the following:

I have two models : Products & brands.
Currently in the product form, the user is able to pick up a brand (via a select list) for his product. But if the brand doesn’t exist he can create a new one by clicking on a link redirecting to the brands/new form.

Is there any way to handle the missing brand creation directly in the product formular ?

I hope I’m clear enough.

Thanks for your answers.

Answer 1

In the form itself, you could allow the user to either select the brand from a dropdown or type the name of a new brand in a text field. I would use radios to force the user to perform one of those two actions, not both. The <option> elements would have a value corresponding to the brand name rather than the brand ID.

Then, on the Rails side, you could use find_or_create_by_name, assuming your brand names are unique:

# assuming a params structure like params[:product][:brand_name]
class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
  def brand_name=(name)
    self.brand = Brand.find_or_create_by_name(name)
  end
end

The controller would still simply do something like this:

@product = Product.new(params[:product])