Adding items in groups in Rails

rubyonrails-talk
1

My product table is id type price location 1 chips $3 aisle3

I have a question with adding the products in groups. There is a quantity field(nonmodel) where the user can enter the quantity While adding a new product if the user enters: type: soda quantity: 3

Then 3 records should be created in product model with type= soda like the following. id type 2 soda 3 soda 4 soda

If user enters location: aisle4 quantity: 2 Then id location 5 ailse4 6 ailse4

Can you tell me how to pass the nonmodel field 'quantity' to the rails(model or controller) and how use it to add the products in groups as mentioned above? or should I create a column called quantity in my product table? Will the history be updated too for all these new records with after_create filter which I already have created? Is there any good tutorial or book which shows how to pass such nonmodel html/javascript fields from view to rails and then back to the view? Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks

2

I think it makes most sence to have a "stock" field in the database, instead of having one record per stock item.

how to pass such nonmodel html/javascript fields from view to rails and then back to the view

You mean "non database" fields, right?

Add this to the model: attr_accessor :attribute_name Then you can use this field like any other field, except that it wont be stored in the database.

3

Seems a little odd what you are doing however to answer your question:

You can add a text_field_tag or a select_tag to your form

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/FormTagHelper.html#M001731

e.g.

<%=text_field_tag :quantity%>

You can then get that via params[:quantity] in your controller from there you can either pass to your model/business logic class or do a simple:

1.upto(params[:quantity].to_i) do |i|   Product.create!(params[:product]) end

Personally though I would seriously consider relooking at the way you are working and perhaps normalize your data so you have 3 models:

location   has_many :products

type   has_many :products

product   belongs_to :location   belongs_to :type

Then you can do the reverse and use fields_for to add multiple products to a location. Similar to this (#196 Nested Model Form Part 1 - RailsCasts)

Cheers Luke