Question

something what should really be easy and I can’t get it to work…
I have a Relation which has_many Contacts and Contact belongs_to Relation. Now I want to show the relation name in the contact index view. In the contacts controller I have this:

@contacts = Contact.paginate :page     => params[:page],
                             :include  => :relations,
                             :per_page => 10,
                             :order    => "last_name"

Now I expect in the index view to be able to use this:

<%= contact.relation.name %>

But it returns a undefined method "name" for nil:NilClass error? Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

My guess is that you have at least one Contact object that doesn’t have an associated Relation object, which is why it’s trying to call .name on a nil value.

You can try doing something like this temporarily to see if you have some Contacts without Relations:

<%= contact.relation.name rescue "MISSING NAME" %>

and see what gets displayed.