in Ruby on Rails 2.3.2, how to print out params during a create action?

Question

there is a scaffold created Story... and in the create action, there is

@story = Story.new(params[:story])

i was curious as to what is in params... so i want to dump out params... but there is no view associated with the create action... is there a way to dump out its content? is there a way to dump out the POST variables in of my code too? (to see what's going on in the lower level)

Answer 1

The easiest thing to do is just dump params out to the log:

Rails.logger.info("PARAMS: #{params.inspect}")

If you're in development mode, just look in your development.log and that line will be there.

The params scope is a combination of URL/FORM (GET/POST) fields, and it will be printed out in the log as part of the normal output processing, so you might not need your own dumping of it - any development or production log contains the params dump at the top of the log line, e.g.

Processing Clients::ClientsController#show (for x.x.x. at 2009-05-24 00:34:26) [GET]
  Parameters: {"id"=>"303", "user_id"=>"2"}

Answer 2

Now I know Rails more, you can also simply use a

p params

in your code and look at the console's output (the log shown on the console)