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Ruby Active Record Associations in Rails Using Associations in Your App Updating an Associated Record

Jacob Brantley
Jacob Brantley
124 Points

Accessing comments from the post_controller

You have shown how to retrieve and use post params from the comments controller. Is there a way to retrieve the params of comments (for multiple comments of an associated post) from the post controller?

4 Answers

Jay McGavren
STAFF
Jay McGavren
Treehouse Teacher

Ah, OK, so you're looking to work with the attributes of your model objects, not parameters from a form submission.

Your code is actually close to working. The problem is with the call to all?:

@post.comments.all? {|booleanAttribute| true?}

The value passed to the block is not an attribute of the comment, it's the Comment object itself. (Each Comment in @post.comments gets passed to the block, one at a time.) So you need to do something like this:

@post.comments.all? {|comment| comment.boolean_attribute}

...Where boolean_attribute is a column you've set up in the comments database table. (It could also be any method on a Comment that returns true or false, but I'm guessing you want a table column.)

all? will return true only if the block returns true for all members of the collection. So if boolean_attribute returns true for all comments on the post, this call to all? will return true.

Jay McGavren
STAFF
Jay McGavren
Treehouse Teacher

To make sure we're using the same terms:

Params: data from form fields submitted as part of a POST or PUT request.

Attributes: instance variables belonging to a model object, usually accessed through methods on that object.

You can definitely use parameters for a comment via the posts controller, or vice-versa. Just add additional fields to your form, and give them whatever names and ids you'd like. You'll then be able to access the submitted fields via the params value within the controller's methods. You can take that form data, and use it to set attributes on any model object you'd like. You can look up or create Post instances from the CommentsController, or Comment instances from the PostsController; there's no limitations.

Jacob Brantley
Jacob Brantley
124 Points

Jay, thank you for the response and the clarification. Please let me elaborate to better describe the intent of my question.

I used the term params based on this from your code:

  class CommentsController < ApplicationController
  # No `new` action because form is provided by PostsController#show
  def create
  @post = Post.find(params[:post_id])

My understanding of the above: From the comments controller (which belongs_to the post object) you are retrieving the post_id attribute from the post object. I would like to know how to do something similar. From within the post controller (which has_many comment objects), retrieve a comment attribute from the comment object. Specifically I'd like to search through boolean attributes of all comments associated with a specific post and check if all results are True. Below is an example of something I tried that didn't work:

  class CommentsController < ApplicationController

  def findAllTrue

  @post = Post.find(params[:id])

  if @post.comments.all? {|booleanAttribute| true?}

  puts "All True"

  else

  puts "Found False"

  end

  end

I would very much appreciate the help to round out my understanding of the module.

Jacob Brantley
Jacob Brantley
124 Points

Jay,

Thank you so much for the help! Still struggling with this for some reason.

I tried this:

Attempt:

   def findAllTrue
     @post = Post.find(params[:id])
       if @post.comments.all? {|comment| comment.boolean_attribute?}
         puts "All True"
         else
         puts "Found False"
       end
   end

And received this error: NoMethodError: undefined method `comments' for nil:NilClass

Jacob Brantley
Jacob Brantley
124 Points

I actually had a typo. That solved it. Thanks!!