I have a strange bug that's driving me slightly crazy. Maybe the
symptoms will be more meaningful to someone else here...
I have a set of REST actions in my controller and a form_for in both
my new and edit views, in both cases with fields_for constructs
embedded. The models have some validation rules in place.
A successful create action renders the edit view to allow
modifications to be made the data.
However, if I enter invalid data into some of the embedded fields in
the form, when I resubmit the form the second time, with either valid
or invalid data, the browser ends up (apparently) invoking the index
action and it associated view instead of create. On the face of it it
kind of looks as if the browser request is coming in as a GET (since
that would turn a create index into an index), but there's no obvious
reason that that should happen for a form, nor any inking in firebug
that that's what's actually happening.
Does this ring any bells with anyone? No doubt something simple, but
my sleep deprived brain just isn't seeing it right now.
Ok, so this didn't attract any suggestions, but here fwiw is how I
solved the problem...
I still don't know exactly why I was ending up in the index view, but
it seems that the underlying problem was that when the form was being
resubmitted after validation failure, Rails was interpreting my
form_for as an "edit" form, rather than a "new" form - and
consequently putting a hidden _method = put parameter in the form
markup.
Apparently the reason it was treating this as an "edit" form the
second time around is that the validation failure was happening in the
"create" action on the embedded "fields_for" fields, but this only
happened after the primary fields for the "form_for" had already been
save! 'd. I had the whole thing wrapped in a transaction, which was
correctly preventing the primary fields from actually making it to the
db, but the objects themselves were still being treated as if they had
been saved - even though they hadn't - and so Rails apparently figured
that the purpose of the subsequent form was to edit this "existing"
data.
The solution: in my "create" action, I just moved the save! of the
primary "form_for" fields to occur _after_ those embedded in
"fields_for" have been save! 'd. This means that if the primary fields
only ever get created if the embedded fields have successfully
validated, i.e. the transaction as a whole is good.
