How do you access attributes in form templates?

rubyonrails-talk
1

I have a Survey-Response application, where surveys can be created with an arbitrary number of questions, and users can respond to an arbitrary number of surveys.

A Survey has_many Questions and has_many Responses. Both a Question and a Response has_many Answers. That way, everybody has a relationship to everyone else.

In the Response#new for each Response.survey.questions I do a @response.answers.build and set the questions_id attribute. That looks like this: 1: survey = Survey.find(params[:survey_id]) 2: @response = survey.responses.build 3: @response.survey.questions.each do |question| 4: @response.answers.build(:question_id => question.id) 5: end

All I want to do in the form template is get the Answer's Question's text to display as a label. That looks like this:

6: <% f.fields_for :answers do |fields| %> 7: <p>Q: <%= Question.find(fields[:question_id]).ask %></p> 8: <p>A: <%= fields.text_field :content %><br /></p> 9: <% end %>

Obviously Line 7 is junk, but that's basically what I want to do. How do I get those prepopulated attribute values? I haven't been able to find anything on this so it's either obviously staring me in the face or an odd question.

I found this similar question, but it hasn't received a reply. http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk/browse_thread/thread/115dbb1ba9215b0f/33779ed24e48c26c?lnk=gst&q=attributes+form#33779ed24e48c26c

Thanks in advance. Dee

2

I haven't had any responses in the past few days, so the problem must be unsolvable in Rails. :wink: LOL

But let me rephrase the question more succinctly.

Assume, Shelf has a description and a set of items. Item has a description, sku and color. Given, I use build in my controller's new method to create a set of models like this: @shelf = Shelf.new 3.times { @shelf.items.build(:sku => GenerateNewSku, :color => 'blue') }

Explain how to display the sku and color in the form for each item? <% form_for @shelf do |f| %>   <%= f.label :description %>   <%= f.text_field :description %>

  <% f.fields_for @shelf.items do |item_fields| %>     <%# ****Want :sku here**** #%>     <%# ****Want :color here**** #%>     <%= item_fields.text_field :description %>   <% end %>

  <%= f.submit %></p> <% end %>

Why I want this: My app has Surveys, and each has many Questions. Each Question has many Answers (one per user). The Answers also belong to a Response, which belong to a User. Response can be thought of as the user's answers to a Survey. If that's not clear, imagine a data diagram in the shape of a diamond, with Survey at the top branching down into Questions and Responses at the next level, and Answers at the bottom. Each level is has_many with the one below it.

In the Response's form, I want to display Question.ask for each question in the Survey as a label for each Answer in the Response. Maybe there is a better way to go about doing this, but I've tried numerous approaches, refactoring the databases, and am just about to switch over to .NET (jk).

3

Maybe I'm totally missing your point, but shouldn't that just be, e.g.

  &lt;% f\.fields\_for @shelf\.items\.each do |item| %&gt;
            &lt;%= item\.sku %&gt;

               ... ??

4

Thanks for replying, Hassan.

I don't think you're missing the point, and, yes, that's what *I* think it should be too. The problem is "item" is type ActionView:Helpers:FormBuilder, and therefore doesn't have a sku property. Or maybe /I'm/ missing something

(I tried to make that clearer by naming it "item_fields" rather than just "item" as you've done here.)

Dee

5

Thanks for replying, Hassan.

I don't think you're missing the point, and, yes, that's what *I* think it should be too. The problem is "item" is type ActionView:Helpers:FormBuilder, and therefore doesn't have a sku property. Or maybe /I'm/ missing something

if you've got a form builder then form_builder.object is the object it is bound to.

Fred

6

Thanks, that what I was looking for. Just found it in the source code. Works like a charm. Thanks Frederick.