Question

This isn’t working as I’d like.

I have an entry form for a new job, which is made up of a number of steps. By default there are 4 new and unsaved steps populated per job.

Using the code from the view below, I am able to attach the jQuery UI datepicker control to the text fields and they appear against the correct input field when i click them.

However, when I select a date from the picker it is only ever going into the field representing the start date of the first step.

<%= form_for @job, :url => jobs_path do |f| %>
    <%= f.label :name %>
    <%= f.text_field :name %>

    <% @job.steps.each do |step| %>
        <%= fields_for "job[step_attributes][]", step do |s| %>
            <%= s.label :name %>
            <%= s.text_field :name %>

            <%= s.label :start_date %>
            <%= s.text_field :start_date, :class => :datepicker %>
        <%= end %>
<% end %>

<script type="text/javascript">
    $(function() {
        $('.datepicker').datepicker({ dateFormat: "dd/mm/yy"});
    });
</script>

I know ultimately this has to do with the generated id attribute for the input elements being the same, was wondering, has anybody successfully overcome this issue?

This fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/twilson/u9m9L/ demonstrates my problem.

Answer 1

First, invoke fields_for on your form builder instead:

<%= f.fields_for :steps do |s| %>

Second, you don’t need to iterate through @job.steps if you specify the association name to fields_for. There’s an example on how to use it with one-to-many assoiciations here.

If you still have this problem, paste your generated HTML, it would easier to find the cause.

EDIT

OK so the problem is because Rails form builder does not generate child indexes to give unique IDs to nested fieldsets. This most likely happened because the associations are built but not yet saved to the DB. One way I see is to assign child indexes manually, like so:

<% @job.steps.each_with_index do |step,i| %>
  <%= f.fields_for :steps, step, :child_index => i do |s| %>

See if that helps.

This is a somewhat contrived scenario given that you have only new objects. To be able to dynamically add/remove nested items, this would be a bit trickier. You can see how this can be dealt with in the nested model Railscasts.