Error when submitting a form with two different models

Question

I have an office model which is a list of all the current offices. I also have a calendar model which will just act as a company calendar. I am trying to get a dropdown of all the current offices to display on the localhost:3000/calendars/new so people can see where the event will be taking place. When I go to submit the form, I get the error shown below. I have posted all relevant code as well. Thanks in advance.

Calendar.rb:

class Calendar < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :office
end

Office.rb:

class Office < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :calendars
end

calendars_controller:

def new
  @calendar = Calendar.new
  @offices = Office.all
end

_form.html.erb:

<div class="field">
  <%= f.label :office_id, class: "general-text-label" %><br>
  <%= collection_select :calendar, :office, @offices, :id, :name, {include_blank: true}, {class: "selectize"} %>
</div>

Error:

Parameters:

Parameters: {"utf8"=>"✓", "authenticity_token"=>"lNP3u+Hs2FYsTBTClWuwJWiwW8HTFECzGVD4CdEOgOF5WD2eNiMNHtQuHjHpynJp7CaIDio09/mhvQg5rLhgtA==", "calendar"=>{"name"=>"Listing Agent Workshop", "description"=>"ffhfh", "date"=>"Friday Feb 17, 2017", "time"=>"4:00 PM", "office"=>"2"}, "commit"=>"Save"}

Answer 1

Rails is trying to infer which Office to associate with your new Calendar . Your calendar is being built as:

Calendar.new({"name"=>"Listing Agent Workshop", "description"=>"ffhfh", "date"=>"Friday Feb 17, 2017", "time"=>"4:00 PM", "office"=>"2"})

Rails knows the office key is an associated model but it expect the value to be an actual instance of an Office , instead here it's just a string.

Instead, you should either specify the id and let rails look it up or find the object first if that is a concern.

First way (change the params):

Calendar.new({"name"=>"Listing Agent Workshop", "description"=>"ffhfh", "date"=>"Friday Feb 17, 2017", "time"=>"4:00 PM", "office_id"=>"2"})

Better way:

office = Office.find(calendar_params[:office])
calendar_params[:office] = office
Calendar.new(calendar_params)