Undefined method error

rubyonrails-talk
1

I have been working on a project based on Michael Hartl's book Ruby on Rails Tutorial in order to try to teach myself Ruby on Rails. However, when it tries to render a form designed to allow a user to submit a small message, I get an error saying, "undefined method `model_name' for NilClass:Class". It says the error is at line 1, which is "<%= form_for @micropost do |f| %>". I have the following defined in app/controllers/microposts_controller.rb:

  def new     @micropost = Micropost.new   end

I would have expected this code to create a blank Micropost object that gets passed to form_for, but that doesn't seem to be what happened. I attached a few files for reference.

Attachments: http://www.ruby-forum.com/attachment/7609/microposts_controller.rb http://www.ruby-forum.com/attachment/7610/_micropost_form.html.erb

2

when you want to create a blank instance of a model for a form’s sake like this

scenario, you should create that blank instance in the controller’s action which

leads to that specific view you’re rendering the form in.

As I recall in Michael Hartl’s Ruby on Rails Tutorial sample application you

rendered the _micropost_form partial in the Page’s controller home.html.erb

view which means you’ll go to that view through the home action in the

PagesController and for handling this nil problem you should put that

line of code (@micropost = Micropost.new) in the home action of the

pages controller.

Hope that helps.

Good Luck :wink:

3

Thank you for the help. Putting "@micropost = Micropost.new" in pages_controller.rb solved this error. However, I now have a new error which states "undefined method `humanize' for nil:NilClass". It says the error is at the line "<%= f.label @user.email %><br />". I defined @user = User.new in pages_controller.rb.

I am doing this a little bit differently from Michael Hartl's book. I want to be able to submit on one form the micropost content, user e-mail address and password instead of having the user logged in.

Sam Serpoosh wrote in post #1069239:

when you want to create a blank instance of a model for a form's sake like this scenario, you should create that blank instance in the controller's action which leads to that specific view you're rendering the form in.

As I recall in Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails Tutorial sample application you rendered the _micropost_form partial in the Page's controller home.html.erb view which means you'll go to that view through the home action in the PagesController and for handling this nil problem you should put that line of code (@micropost = Micropost.new) in the home action of the pages controller.

Hope that helps. Good Luck :wink:

  end --

-- Sam Serpoosh Software Developer: http://masihjesus.wordpress.com Twitter @masihjesus <http://twitter.com/masihjesus&gt;

Attachments: http://www.ruby-forum.com/attachment/7611/_micropost_form.html.erb

4

Ok, of course you can do this. The thing that you should pay attention to

is that when the user fill the information in your special form in the home

page (including user_email, user_password, micropost_content) you should

authorize the user first by his/her user_email and password and the combination

of those two is ok then you create a new micropost by that content and associate

it to the user that you authorized at this point you created a complete micropost

with its user association.

But be careful about using the form and it’s labels and fields cause in this

scenario you did the “@user = User.new” and @user.email is nil and then

you have this line → “<%= f.label @user.email” %>" so rails tried to create

some id and name for the label field using the argument you provided (@user.email)

and it calls the humanize method on it for some string generation and replacing white

spaces with underscores (which doesn’t matter if you don’t know exactly at this point)

and according to the fact that @user.email is nil then the humanize method on it will

throw the “undefined method on nil” exception.

you should change the argument to the f.label accordingly and be careful about it.

Hope that helps.

Good Luck :wink: