Rails nested routing + shallow edit not working

Question

I would like to use some routing like this:

resources :customers do
  resources :electricity_counters, :shallow => true do
    resources :electricity_bills, :shallow => true
  end
end

Creating a electricity_counter works fine, but edit doesn't work as expected.. If I visit electricity_counters/1/edit I only get blank fields and all my data is missing.

My _form.html.erb for that starts like this

<%= form_for([@customer, @customer.electricity_counters.build]) do |f| %>

and the controller methods for new and edit are like this:

# GET customers/1/electricity_counters/new
  def new
    @customer = Customer.find(params[:customer_id])
    @electricity_counter = @customer.electricity_counters.build
  end

  # GET /electricity_counters/1/edit
  def edit
    @electricity_counter = ElectricityCounter.find(params[:id])
    @customer = @electricity_counter.customer
  end

In debug it seems to be that my @customer variable isn't set right.. but maybe I'm just to stupid to use that aptana debugger;)

The electricity_counter model has the association to a customer set by:

belongs_to :customer

So what am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Your problem is this line.

<%= form_for([@customer, @customer.electricity_counters.build]) do |f| %>

It builds a new electricity_counter no matter what you want to do. Since you're handling that in the controller.

But since you want to use the same _form partial for both new and edit you have to be able to change the form path. Basically I ended up doing something like this:

Controller

def new
  @customer = Customer.find(params[:customer_id])
  @electricity_counter = @customer.electricity_counters.build
  @path = [@customer, @electricity_counter]
end

def edit
  @electricity_counter = ElectricityCounter.find(params[:id])
  @customer = @electricity_counter.customer
  @path = @electricity_counter
end

Form

<%= form_for(@path) do |f| %>

Also your routes.rb is off change it to this

resources :customers, :shallow => true do
  resources :electricity_counters, :shallow => true do
    resources :electricity_bills
  end
end