Update action | NoMethodError | nil.to_sym

rubyonrails-talk
1

Ok, totally no reason why I'm getting an error in this model update and no other. HELP!

CONTROLLER:

  # GET /employees/1/edit   def edit     @employee = Employees.find(params[:id])

  end

VIEW:

<h1>Edit Employee</h1> <div id="main-sub"> <%= error_messages_for :employees %>

<% form_for(@employee) do |f| %> <table width="600" border="0">     <tr>         <td class="label">Email:         </td>         <td><%= f.text_field :email %> (required, will be login to intranet)         </td>     </tr>

ROUTES:

  map.resources :employees

All pretty standard stuff - what's going on?

ERROR:

NoMethodError in Employees#edit

Showing employees/edit.html.erb where line #5 raised:

You have a nil object when you didn't expect it! The error occurred while evaluating nil.to_sym

Extracted source (around line #5):

2: <div id="main-sub"> 3: <%= error_messages_for :employees %> 4: 5: <% form_for(@employee) do |f| %> 6: <table width="600" border="0"> 7: <tr> 8: <td class="label">Email:

Thanks so much in advance!

2

Look in your controller where you assign @employee. You are calling find on a plural model (Employees.find). Is your model defined as "Employees"? The Rails convention is to have models named in a singular form, ie Employee, because it defines an instance of a singleton object.

Try changing Employees.find to Employee.find and see if that clears up the funkiness.

Also, this might be way off, but some attribute names can cause problems with ActiveRecord. Attributes that have the same name as internal ActiveRecord methods cause sporadic errors. The Rails wiki has a running list of pseudo-reserved words known to cause problems with AR: http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/ReservedWords

3

Miked,

Basically your var @employee is nil when you pass it to form_for(). That means Employees.find(params[:id]) is returning nil (either is not working, or the :id doesn't exist)...

As Patrick put, the model name is not standard (should be Employee) and finding by hand may also help.

Cheers, Sazima