The proper way of creating association between Ckeditor::Picture and a model in Ruby on Rails?

Question

I have an Article model and Ckeditor + Paperclip installed. When I upload pictures into Article body, everything works fine. However, I want to make these pictures accessible via @article.pictures without creating a separate Picture model. I've already created a regular association between Article and Ckeditor::Picture. But when I'm uploading a picture, Ckeditor not surprisingly requires an Article id. Where and how am I supposed to pass it?

class CreateCkeditorAssets < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.2]
  t.references :article, foreign_key: true
end

class Article < ApplicationRecord
  has_many :pictures, class_name: 'Ckeditor::Picture'
end

class Ckeditor::Picture < Ckeditor::Asset
  belongs_to :article
end

Answer 1

You can't pass an article ID, because at the time when you upload pictures your article isn't persisted (unless you're editing an already saved article).

So what you can do is to build an article with some unique token, then after uploading pictures and saving the article, update article_id in all pictures that have the same token.

Like this: (pseudocode, not tested)

class Article < ApplicationRecord
  has_many :pictures, class_name: 'Ckeditor::Picture'

  after_save :assign_pictures

  private

  def assign_pictures
    Ckeditor::Picture.where(token: picture_token).update_all(article_id: id)
  end
end

-

class Ckeditor::Picture < Ckeditor::Asset
  belongs_to :article, optional: true
end

-

class Ckeditor::PicturesController
  def create
    @picture = Ckeditor::Picture.new
    @picture.token = params[:picture_token] # pass this param via javascript, see: https://github.com/galetahub/ckeditor/blob/dc2cef2c2c3358124ebd86ca2ef2335cc898b41f/app/assets/javascripts/ckeditor/filebrowser/javascripts/fileuploader.js#L251-L256
    super
  end
end

-

class ArticlesController < ApplicationController
  def new
    @article = Article.new(picture_token: SecureRandom.hex)
  end
end

Obviosly you need to add picture_token field to your Article model and token field to Ckeditor::Picture . Hope that helps.