collection_select not remembering selected value

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hello-

I have a form that I'm using form_for on to bind the form to my order object. Within the form, I want to select a product (each order has one product, which makes this easy). In my order and product models, an order belongs_to a product. I didn't specify that a product has_many orders (although I did test that the problem still exists even if I do specify that). Here's the code I'm using to generate the select list:

@packages = Package.find(:all, :order => 'name') #this is in my controller

<%= f.collection_select :product, @products, :id, :name, { :prompt => '--select one--'} %>

The call to collection_select creates the list of options just fine, but if my order has a value set for product, it doesn't get set as the selected value.

I've tried a slew of other variations on the call to collection_select (e.g., using :product_id instead of :product) and all seem to fail.

Does anyone know what I might be doing wrong?

Regards, Eric

2

One more thing. I debugged my app and when I inspect my @order object, the product field is being correctly set. I debugged a little deeper and it looks like at some point, Rails is trying to decide to set a particular option to selected by evaluating something like the following (assuming product id 7 was selected):

"7" == 7

It looks like, for the purpose of setting my model's attributes, the product id is being turned into an integer, but for selecting a value in collection_select, it is keeping it a string. Very confusing.

-Eric

3

Ah ha, I figured it out. In my migration, I had accidentally specified that the product_id column should be a string, instead of an integer. Once I changed the type, everything worked great.

Regards, Eric