Rails Form Not Updating the Attributes - ruby-on-rails

Question

Is this the correct way of defining form, let me know if I need to provide any more details.
This is the UserPreference forms in new.html.erb
<%= form_for :user_preference, url: user_preferences_path do |u|%>
<p>
<%= u.label :title %><br>
<%= u.text_field :title %>
</p>
<p>
<%= u.label :description %><br>
<%= u.text_field :description %>
</p>
<p> <%= u.label :back_ground_color %><br>
<select name="bgcolor" id="bgcolor">
<option value="#FF3300">Orange</option>
<option value="#00FF00">Green</option>
<option value="#0000FF">Blue</option>
<option value="#FF0066">Pink</option>
<option value="#FFFF00">Yellow</option>
<option value="#FFFFFF">White</option>
</select>
</p>
<p>
<%= u.label :font %><br>
<select name="font" id="font">
<option value="Times New Roman">Times new Roman</option>
<option value="Verdana">Verdana</option>
<option value="Arial">Arial</option>
<option value="sans-serif">serif</option>
</select>
</p>
<br >
<p>
<%= u.submit %>
</p>
I am getting title and description when I am trying to render in html,
the attribute is not getting updated in database.
UserPreference.controller.rb
class UserPreferencesController < ApplicationController
def new
#user_preference = UserPreference.new
end
def create
#user_preference = UserPreference.new(userp_params)
#user_preference.save unless user_signed_in?
render plain: params[:user_preference].inspect
end
def edit
end
def update
end
private
def userp_params
params.require(:user_preference).permit(:title, :bgcolor, :font, :description)
end
end

Answer 1

When you say this
<%= u.text_field :description %>
because you are working with :user_preference, it will make an input like
<input type="text" name="user_preference[description]" value="foo">
(where 'foo' is the current value, or maybe it's blank)
Note the "name" attribute: this will go into params like
params = {:user_preference => {:description => "foo"}}
If you are going to hand-code the select then you need to make sure the name attribute has this structure too, eg
<select name="user_preference[bgcolor]" id="bgcolor">
So you will get params like
params = {:user_preference => {:description => "foo", :bgcolor => "#FFFFFF"}}
Which then allows you to say
#user_preference.attributes = params[:user_preference]
which is the standard way to deal with this in the controller.
However, rather than writing out all the html for the select, it's much nicer to use the rails form helpers (select in this case) like you do with the text fields. You can also define the options for the select with the options_for_select helper, which saves a lot of typing too.
<%= u.select :bgcolor, options_for_select([["Orange", "#FF3300"], ["Green", "#00FF00"], ["Blue", "#0000FF"], ["Pink", "#FF0066"], ["Yellow", "#FFFF00"], ["White", "#FFFFFF"]]) %>
It's also cleaner to define this variable of options in your code somewhere, eg in a UserPreference class method:
class UserPreference < ActiveRecord::Base
#class methods section
class << self
def bgcolor_options
[["Orange", "#FF3300"], ["Green", "#00FF00"], ["Blue", "#0000FF"], ["Pink", "#FF0066"], ["Yellow", "#FFFF00"], ["White", "#FFFFFF"]]
end
end
end
Now you can use the select like so:
<%= u.select :bgcolor, options_for_select(UserPreference.bgcolor_options) %>
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/form_helpers.html#the-select-and-option-tags