Creating multiple records for a model in a single view in Rails

ruby-on-rails, simple-form

Solution

The reason you can't use the same method as the other question in your post is bc @book is not a nested attribute of user. You are only creating a form for one new book, so without anything special in the controller, rails will only save one book. One option is to make books a nested attribute of user so that you can create multiple books at once. Here is how you need to set up your models and form to handle nested attributes.

Class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :books
  accepts_nested_attributes_for :books, :reject_if => lambda { |b| b[:title].blank? }
  attr_accessible :books_attributes
end 

Class Book < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :user
end

The `reject_if` will ignore any records that are submitted to the controller without a title. You will want this since you are assuming that many users won't use all 10 fields. Below is your form.

<%= form_for @user do |f| %>
  <%= f.fields_for :books, [Book.new]*10 do |book| %>
    <%= book.text_field :title %>
    <%= book.association :book_category %>
  <% end %>
  <%= f.submit %>
<% end %>

It is important to note that this form will be submitted to the Users controller since it is a user form. The users controller will handle creating/updating all the books like it would any other attribute of user since books are now accepted as a nested attribute. For more examples checkout this Railscast on nested attributes.

As I mentioned above, this is only one option. If you do not want to make book a nested attribute of user then another option is to generate your 10 sets of book input fields like you are already doing and then break apart the params hash in the create action in the Books controller. By doing this you could loop through the hash and create a book for each set of inputs. This is much more "hacky" than using `accepts_nested_attributes_for` but it is another option so I figured I would mention it.

Problem

I have a model named `Book`, and I want to adjust the standard `Book#new` to show the fields for 10 books, so that 10 can be created at once instead of just one. I looked at this question and found that I could repeat the form if I added `10.times` to my form. However, I didn't do it correctly because a new record is saved, but with all fields null. What I want to do is to: - Allow the user to enter up to 10 books at one-time and then save them - If the user populates only three book records, create only three (and ignore the seven records in the form others with null values) My view: ``` <%= simple_form_for(@book) do |f| %> <%= f.error_notification %> <% 10.times do |index|%> <%= f.input :title %> <%= f.association :book_category %> <% end %> <%= f.submit %> <% end %> ``` My controller is unchanged from the scaffolding code: ``` def new @book = Book.new end def create @book = Book.new(params[:book]) end ```

Original source