Ruby on Rails: assign relationship on creation - ruby-on-rails

Question

I'm new to Ruby on Rails. There are two models in my project: room and guest. The association is "room has_many guests" and "guest belongs to room".
I have separated views for manage rooms and guests. Rooms don't require "guests" value on creation. However, I want to create new guests and assign it to certain room at the same time. What will be the proper way to do it? How do I transfer the input from web and match the entities in database.
The code is pretty much the same as "Getting Started with Rails". In the tutorial, they add "comments" in the "article" view and use "comment" as a sub-resource of "article". In my case, I treat the two models equally and want to manage them in separated views.
Update:
I used the collection_select and try to work with my guest_controller.
<%= form_for :guest, url: guests_path do |f| %>
<% if #guest.errors.any? %>
<div id="error_explanation">
<h2>
<%= pluralize(#guest.errors.count, "error") %> prohibited this guest from being added:
</h2>
<ul>
<% #guest.errors.full_messages.each do |msg| %>
<li><%= msg %></li>
<% end %>
</ul>
</div>
<% end %>
<p>
<%= f.label :name %><br>
<%= f.text_field :name %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.label :phone %><br>
<%= f.text_field :phone %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.label :room%><br>
<%= f.text_field :room %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.label :room %><br>
<%= f.collection_select(:room_id, Room.all, :id, :title) %>
</p>
<p>
<%= f.submit %>
</p>
<% end %>
<%= link_to 'Back', guests_path %>
In my guest_controller, the create method called by the form above is :
def create
#guest = Guest.new(guest_params)
#guest.room = Room.find(params[:room_id])
if #guest.save
redirect_to #guest
else
render 'new'
end
end
However, when I create a new guest, it shows that:
ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound in GuestsController#create
Couldn't find Room with 'id'=
I checked that room_id=4 and Room.find(4) return the proper room.
What's wrong?

Answer 1

If you want to select one room from those that exist, use collection_select form helper, here is a relevant snippet from the docs:
f.collection_select(:city_id, City.all, :id, :name)
This outputs a dropdown list that:
fills in city_id parameter in this context
uses City.all for filling in the options in the list (I will be referring to "each" city as city)
uses city.id as data (that gets sent in the form)
shows city.name for each city in the dropdown list (hopefully, human-readable)
Bear in mind though, that in terms of security it's like "look, you can select this, and this and this!", that does not prevent users from selecting an unlisted option: either by modifying form markup by hand or sending handcrafted queries.
So should you ever be limiting access to specific rooms, and list only Room.unlocked (unlocked assumed a scope), make sure the received room_id refers to a room from that scope as well. Most of these problems are dealt with using either validations or careful association management (Room.unlocked.find_by_id(:room_id) that outputs nil if the room is not in that scope).
UPD: as for the latest problem you're having -- your understanding on how the form contents look in params seems to be wrong. It's quite a common misconception actually.
form_for :guest will construct a separate object/hash in params[:guest], with all the form's fields inside it. So it actually is inside params[:guest][:room_id], but no, don't rush with adding the missing part.
You've already built a #guest object from entire params[:guest], so if the room actually exists, it's inside #guest.room already and can be validated inside the model during save. Have a look at Rails validators.

Answer 2

Take a look at the fields_for tag:
http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/FormHelper.html#method-i-fields_for
It allows just that, to create a guest while creating a room and associating each other.