I have been trying to analyze this problem very closely but I am still yet to find a good way to approach it. (Hope my explanation is good enough)
So I have three models [user, status and milestone]
the status model belongs to the user model
The milestone model belongs to status model and also to the user model through the status model
Okay so I want to tie each milestone to a model by doing something like (milestone.build_status, this is pretty easy from the CLI, I have tested and tried it, and it works as expected.)
So the big issue I am having is on the web page. I am displaying all the statuses (I have already handled cases when the user enter a status) to user with a corresponding text field where they can enter their milestone, well when I do I post I can only get the params of the text field that was supplied (duh! isnt that obvious).
My question would be what are some possible approaches that I can use to figure which particular status that the user entered the milestone for.
I think you may be looking for Active Record Nested Attributes
This will allow your forms for your object of the User model to also accept input for its associated Status and/or Milestone objects for creating and updating each associated records all in one transaction.
Related
I followed the railscasts nested model form part 1, making some changes to have it work in rails 4. Basically, I created 3 models: Quiz, Question, and Answer, and they all belong_to the model intuitively above them. A form in the new action is used to create the quiz itself.
However, I'm at a bit of loss on how to proceed now. After creating the quiz, the show view looks like this:
done by iterating through #quiz.questions and #quiz.questions.answers and just displaying them on the page with their respective content attributes.
That's great for displaying just the questions and answers, but it doesn't accept user input at all. How do I make it so the user can use radio buttons to select an answer, and have it submit SOMEWHERE to save the results for grading and future reference for the user?
I've actually tried to create a form simply within the show action and have it save to another model but I got stuck extremely quickly. I'm finding it really difficult to both display the results AND accept user input for the displayed results. I also can't figure out a good way to save this data. Making another 3 models with the equivalent of Questions having something like a user_answer attribute seems difficult to implement and messy. I'm a beginner of the grandest caliber so any help would be great!
Nachime, your data model is good so far from what I can tell. Now you will want to link the answers to the users via many-to-many relationship. Note: this assumes that users will only take each quiz once.
Your next data model version will have a users_answers table containing user_id and answer_id. You can access the relative models using the has_many :through association so that each user has_many :answers, through: :users_answers.
The quiz will essentially just link the logged in user to the array of answers selected.
I'm not sure what's the best approach in my situation, I would like an opinion.
My situation is:
I have a "Ticket" model, having several fields of many kinds: text, numerical and associations. Tickets support comments through the acts_as_commentable gem.
The tickets are generated by users, who can comment and modify their own tickets.
Because the fields of a ticket can change over time I would like to allow my users to modify several of them. What I need though is to keep a commented history of all the changes, so that at any moment they can see in a ticket what, why and when was changed, in the comment, timestamp and list of changes that they can see together with the comment.
I was thinking to solve this by generating a "TicketUpdate" model, have the TicketUpdates generated in the Comments form (using fields_for and accepts_nested_attributes_for).
Basically the user could select in a drop down list (i.e. a select tag) the field they want to change, changing the value of the drop down would trigger an event to show an appropriate input field (input for the text and numeric fields, select for the associations) with the old value pre-populated
I could intercept the TicketUpdates in the "comment/create" controller performing the updates.
This approach would look nice and sweet to the user, but I don't see how to implement in a neat or DRY way.
Because ticket has many fields and they are mixed decimals and associations, I would have to implement specific logic for each field, both in the view and in the controller.
I'm not sure if there's maybe a better approach, or there's actually any gem or trick to get this done easily.
anyone got anything to recommend me here?
I'm using rails 3.2.8.
I'm building an app called "CourseWork to dig into rails/develop my skills and I have a question about how to structure it. Users have a resource called "CourseGrading" that is able to create categories and belongs to "Course". Each "category" should have a name, a percentage out of 100 and a course_id. I need to add these percentages together and alert users if the total isn't 100 while still saving.
Then the user's generated "categories" should populate an enum_string specific to that user in a resource called "CourseAssignment" which has a name, description, category and finalgrade.
Can anyone give hints or resources for how best to accomplish this? Thanks
You probably want to take a look at Active Record Callbacks. These will allow you to insert some code to be run when creating/validating/updating/deleting models.
You should probably make use of the ActiveRecord validations.
Check out this guide that explains how to write your own custom validator. Your custom validator would run when the form gets submitted, and in it, you would grab the percentage params and do your check. If it's not what you expect, you can just add an error to the form and the validation process will just kick the user back to the form page and display the error.
I would like to allow users to write comments on a site. If they are registered users their username is displayed with the comment, otherwise allow them to type in a name which is displayed instead.
I was going to create a default anonymous user in the database and link every non-registered comment to that user. Would there be a better way to do it?
Any advice appreciated.
Thanks.
The problem with creating an anonymous user is then you need to check if a comment was made by a "real" user, or an anonymous one when displaying the name, so that introduces complexity. Plus, if you have a way of viewing their profile page, which may include posting history, you'd need to exclude the anonymous user with an exception.
Generally it's better to have a column on your comments which represents the user's visible name, and just show that if provided, or the registered user's name otherwise. For instance, your view helper might look like this:
class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :user
def user_name
self.anonymous_name or (self.user and self.user.name) or 'Anonymous'
end
end
This will display the contents of the anonymous_name field of the Comment record, or the user's name if a user is assigned, or 'Anonymous' as a last-ditch effort to show something.
Sometimes it's advantageous to actually de-normalize a lot of the database when dealing with large numbers of comments so you don't have to load in the user table via a join simply to display a name. Populating this field with the user's name, even if they're not anonymous, may help with this, though it does mean these values need to be updated when a username changes, presuming that's even possible.
I think you can make user_id on your comment model nullable since you want to allow non registered users to add comments as well. As far as adding names for the non registered users are concerned, there are two options for that
option 1. Add a column on Comment model and name it like anonymous_user where you will store names of non registered users
option 2. Create a another model AnonymousCommentor with name and comment_id attributes.
If you are going to use anonymous users for other things as well apart from comment in your application then you can make it polymorphic and use a suitable name like AnonymousUser instead of AnonymousCommentor
What's the best way to report errors on form fields not associated with a particular model in Rails? As an example, I have a form for the batch creation of user accounts with random users / passwords. It takes as inputs the quantity of users to make, information about what attributes all users should have, and information about the batch which is stored in a user_batches model associated with the created users.
Ideally there would be some errors_on like way to list errors coming from the quantity field, which is associated with no model, the user information fields, associated with the user records that get created, and the user_batches model with minimal code.
This also applies to search forms and the like, which don't get run through AR validations. Any ideas?
You can add your own errors manually to your model object like this.
#user_batch.errors.add_to_base("Foo")