Nil foreign key in a nested form - ruby-on-rails

Question

I have a nested form with the following models:
class Incident < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :incident_notes
belongs_to :customer
belongs_to :user
has_one :incident_status
accepts_nested_attributes_for :incident_notes, :allow_destroy => false
end
class IncidentNote < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :incident
belongs_to :user
end
Here is the controller for creating a new Incident.
def new
#incident = Incident.new
#users = #customer.users
#statuses = IncidentStatus.find(:all)
#incident.incident_notes.build(:user_id => current_user.id)
respond_to do |format|
format.html # new.html.erb
format.xml { render :xml => #incident }
end
end
def create
#incident = #customer.incidents.build(params[:incident])
#incident.incident_notes.build(:user_id => current_user.id)
respond_to do |format|
if #incident.save
flash[:notice] = 'Incident was successfully created.'
format.html { redirect_to(#incident) }
format.xml { render :xml => #incident, :status => :created, :location => #incident }
else
format.html { render :action => "new" }
format.xml { render :xml => #incident.errors, :status => :unprocessable_entity }
end
end
end
This all exists in a nested form for an incident. There is a text area for the incident_notes form that is nested in the incident.
So my problem is that the incident_notes entry is submitted twice whenever I create the incident. The first insert statement creates an incident_note entry with the text from the text area, but it doesn't attach the user_id of the user as the foreign key. The second entry does not contain the text, but it has the user_id.
I thought I could do this with:
#incident.incident_notes.build(:user_id => current_user.id)
but that does not appear to work the way I want. How can I attach the user_id to incident_note?
Thanks!

Answer 1

I finally figured it out. I needed to do this in the Incident controller:
def create
#incident = #customer.incidents.build(params[:incident])
#incident.incident_notes.first.user = current_user
rather than:
def create
#incident = #customer.incidents.build(params[:incident])
#incident.incident_notes.build(:user_id => current_user.id)

Answer 2

I don't think you need
#incident.incident_notes.build(:user_id => current_user.id)
on new action. You're building the incident_notes twice.