Question about find_by

Rails
1

hi,

i am new to ruby/rails, and i am struggling with the find_by method.
Heres some background on what i am trying to get done:

I have a User object, and a Book. User has_one Book, and Book
belongs_to User.

basically, i have a combo box which displays all the books, i get the
id the book is stored in, from the form and then in the user model
class, i try and find the according and assign the according book,
with this find method:

self.book = Book.find_by_id(b_id)

unfortunately i end up with this error:

Mysql::Error: #42S22Unknown column ‘books.user_id’ in ‘where clause’:
SELECT * FROM books WHERE (books.user_id = 1) LIMIT 1

I dont understand why it is searching the user_id column (which doesnt
exist), rather than id …

At first, i thought something was wrong with my Book.find_by
statement, but i tried the same line in an ActionMailer, and it worked
fine.

can someone please clear this up?

thanks!

2

My guess is that it’s because you are using self in the User class.

Try:

@book = Book.find_by_id(b_id)

3

My guess is that the associations are set up wrong. If a User has_one
Book then it will indeed assume there’s a user_id column on books. It
may seem slightly unintuitive, but you may want to swap it around - a
User belongs_to a Book, if you have a book_id column on the users
table, and a Book has_one (or has_many) User(s).

4

Hi Gabriel,

you guessed right…that was my mistake…it does seem counter
intuitive, but my user has the book id, and my books do not has a
user_id, since a book can belong to many users.

but it still isnt working, this line seems to fail in my rhtml file:

Book: <%= current_user.book %>

can i not access relationships this way?

5

i actually copied the wrong thing. i originally had what you
suggested, but it was failing…after snoopin around a bit…i
realized i accidentally deleted the ‘end’ at the end of my Book
class…stupid vi…

thanks!

6

Unless you’ve defined a to_s method on Book, you want to call the
explicit attribute you wish to display the value of - like
current_user.book.name or current_user.book.title for example.