Rails often teaches me that other people have thought about my problems before I have but this time, I did not find anything…
I have 3 models : Node, Volume and Filesystem (I’m using Mongoid but I think the problem is the same with ActiveRecord)
Node has_many volumes and filesystems ; Volume has_many filesystems.
I define volumes and filesystems in the same ‘node’ form (with JS updating each filesystem’s “volume” selectbox when a volume is added/changed/removed). This form works fine.
The problem resides when trying to persist filesystems when saving node :
As new volumes doesn’t have any ID yet, I’m using volumes name as values in the selectbox, but the foreign key is the ID (names are unique within a node but different nodes will have volumes with same name, so I can’t use name as an ID).
In nodes_controller‘s create and update actions, I need to find a solution to save volumes first, and then replace params[:node][:filesystems_attributes] containing volume names by their respective IDs. This is very dirty and I’m wondering if it could be done in a clean way.
Has anyone else had the same issue?
The only really “clean” solution would be to save volumes and filesystems in different steps but my app really needs to be “less clicks is better” as Node contains many other nested models (and forms).
I’ve just nested Filesystem into Volume instead of Node and it works like a charm.
Bad designs make bad questions ;o)