So you’re in active development and want some real-ish data in your app, eh? And you keep making adjustments to your model as you understand the requirements better? Oh? Your models are deeply nested, like a proper associative-normalizing ninja?
So I was struggling mightily with this, and couldn’t find any tutorials that gave me the key. Here were my (non operational) models (simplified for this post):
class User < ActiveRecord::Base attr_accessible :email, :password, :password_confirmation has_many :surveys accepts_nested_attributes_for :surveys end
and
class Survey < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :user attr_accessible :name, :active end
So now you want to see these with a sample user + survey? Should be easy right,
accepts_nested_attributes_for
is set! I expected this would work:
params = { :u => {
:email => "me@awesome.com", :password => "guessthishackers", :surveys_attributes => [
{ :name => 'Test Survey', :active => true}
]
}}
person = User.create(params[:u])
No dice. Fails with a “can’t mass-assign error” in the development log. A great deal of searching didn’t provide an obvious answer, but points clearly to the model. After a fair amount of googling and head scratching, the answer hit me like a brick:
attr_accessible :surveys_attributes
Duh, the attributes hash is a first-level attribute of User, in-and-of-itself!
Moral of the story — seeds.rb is a ruby file that mass-assigns for breakfast. Tweak your models accordingly.
Tags: blog, models, programming, rails