collection_select help

[Hunter McMillen]

Hey,

I am writing a rails app and running into some trouble with collection_select, I am using collection_select to create two drop down lists in my application; but when the user (me) selects one then creates a new entry, the pieces of the entry that relate to the select are empty.

Here is what I have in my new.html.erb

    
<h1>New bet</h1>

<% form_for(@bet) do |f| %>
  <%= f.error_messages %>
  
  <p>
    <%= f.label :user_id %><br />
    <%= collection_select(:user, :name, User.find(:all), :id, :name, {}, :multiple => true) %>
  </p>
  <p>
    <%= f.label "Bet Date"%><br />
    <%= f.date_select :bet_date %>
  </p>
  <p>
    <%= f.label "Bet Amount" %><br />
    <%= f.text_field :bet_amount %>
  </p>
  <p>
    <%= f.label "Milestone ID" %><br />
    <%= collection_select(:milestone, :id, Milestone.find(:all), :id, :projected_date, {:prompt => "Select a Milestone"}) %>
  </p>
  <p>
    <%= f.submit 'Create' %>
  </p>
<% end %>

<%= link_to 'Back', bets_path %>

And here is my index definition in my controller:

   
class BetsController < ApplicationController
  # GET /bets
  # GET /bets.xml
  def index
    @bets = Bet.find(:all)

    respond_to do |format|
      format.html # index.html.erb
      format.xml  { render :xml => @bets }
    end
  end
 

'
Thanks,
Hunter

[Balaji Loganathan]

Did you traced at console?
What request parameters you see?

[Marc Peabody]

The first thing I inspect when I have problems like this is to view the source of the rendered page in my browser. If you inspect yours I'll bet you'll find:
<select name="user[name]">
and
<select name="milestone[id]">

That's a problem because these say "I want to set the id attribute on my User model and the id attribute on my Milestone model." Your model to update is Bet, not User or Milestone.

What you need it to say is "I want to set the user attribute on my Bet model and also the milestone attribute on my Bet model."

It needs to end up looking like:
<select name="bet[user]">
and
<select name="bet[milestone]">

Changing the first two symbols you pass to collection_select will fix this.

In fact, I believe you can even eliminate the first symbol from your parameters by simply calling collection_select against your form object (like you did with the other fields).

Also, there's a shortcut for MyModel.find(:all) of MyModel.all

Hope all this helps!