Loading association data from database into edit.html.erb - ruby-on-rails

Question

I have the following one to many associations. Document has many Sections and Section has many Items.
class Document < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :document_sections, :dependent => :destroy, :autosave => true
has_many :document_items, :through => :document_sections
end
class DocumentSection < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :document
has_many :document_items, :dependent => :destroy, :autosave => true
end
class DocumentItem < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :document_section
end
And the 'edit' action as follows :-
def edit
#document = Document.find(params[:id])
end
Here is the edit.html.erb
<h1>Edit!</h1>
<% form_for(#document) do |f| %>
<%= f.error_messages %>
<p>
<p> Header Comment <p/><br />
<%= f.text_field :comment %>
<%= f.hidden_field :uid %>
</p>
<% #document.document_sections.each do |section| %>
<% f.fields_for :section, :index => section.id do |s| %>
<p>
<%= s.hidden_field :seqnum, options = {:value => section.seqnum} %>
</p>
<% section.document_items.each do |item| %>
<% s.fields_for :item, :index => item.id do |i| %>
<p>
<%= i.text_area :comments, options = {:value => item.comments} %>
</p>
<% end %>
<% end %>
<% end %>
<% end %>
<p>
<%= f.submit "Submit Comments" %>
</p>
<% end %>
I have to specify the options hash with the value attribute set, for eg:
options = {:value => item.comments}
in order to show the item comments when I click the 'edit' link to modify the item comments. Shouldn't they be loaded by default, which seems to be the case for header comments.
Thanks for replying. Yes, i want to render the text area with the item.comments value from the database. The below code I had, does not load the comments.
<% s.fields_for :item, :index => item.id do |i| %>
<p>
<%= i.text_area :comments %>
</p>
<% end %>
can you explain me why
<%= text_area(:item, :comments) %>
works but
<%= i.text_area :comments %>
does not. Thanks much.

Answer 1

It seems your understanding of options is not correct. Here is what it is:
Additional options on the input tag can be passed as a hash with options
Which means that options sets attributes for the HTML tag.
You did not specify what exactly you want to do in the question, but I assume you want to render textarea tag with item.comments as a value. If so then you can use the 2nd parameter method (see the docs) and try this:
text_area(:item, :comments, :size => "20x30")
# => <textarea cols="20" rows="30" id="item_comments" name="item[comments]">
# #{#item.comments}
# </textarea>