Rails drop down menu not saving selected data

Question

I am returning to rails and hobby programming after several years away. I started a new project and I have run into an issue using drop down menus. I am positive it is a small mistake but I am having trouble finding an answer online.

I am making a database of Restaurants. I have a model setup called "meals" which has seeded data for breakfast, lunch, dinner. When creating a new restaurant entry, I want to be able to select from a drop down which meal category the restaurant serves which then saves the meal_id to the restaurant entry. I have meal belongs_to restaurant and restaurant has_one meal. I copied and pasted the below code into the restaurant's form.html.erb and after it didn't work I found more examples online and I do believe it should have worked but it keeps showing that it never saved that data.

<div 
class="field">
  <%= form.label "Meal" %>
  <%= form.collection_select(:meal_id, Meal.all, :id, :meal, { :prompt => 'Select a Meal', :selected => @restaurant.meal_id }, { class: 'form-control' }) %>

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

One issue:

This is the method, note the order of the variables:

collection_select(object, method, collection, value_method, text_method, options = {}, html_options = {})

So try this (if Restaurant is the object of the form):

form.collection_select(:restaurant, :meal_id, Meal.all.select(:name), :id, :name, {:prompt => 'Select a Meal' }, { class: 'form-control' })

Your real issue could be elsewhere, but without being able to see the whole form ERB or the controller code, I can only troubleshoot what I see.