Problem with my show page

Rails
1

Ok I have now got my papers to be able to have an author be selected for
them from a drop down box generated in the new paper page
‘papers/new.html.erb’, which was fixed in an earlier post.

Now I have a problem on the other side of the site, I now want to
display a table in the authors show page ‘authors/show.html.erb’, that
displays all the papers made by the specific author shown in the authors
show page.

How I plan to do this is by getting the authors controller to only pick
from the papers table where the papers.author field = the authors.name
field (both fields being the author name).

So far I have the table set out in the authors/show.html.erb page like
this:

Papers owned by the Author

<% for paper in @papers %>




<% end %>
Paper
<%=h paper.title %>

And so far the show method for my author controller is displayed as so:

def show
@author = Author.find(params[:id])
@papers = Paper.find(:all)

respond_to do |format|
  format.html # show.html.erb
  format.xml  { render :xml => @author }
  format.xml  { render :xml => @papers }
end

end

Obviously all this is going to do is show all the papers in the papers
table, rather than the ones whos author = the author name in the authors
table.

Could anyone help me with this? I beleive that the change needs to be
made in the ‘@papers = Paper.find(:all)’ line in the controller, i just
do not know what to replace this line with.

Thanks for any replies.

2

Hi Rik,

On Fri, 2009-04-03 at 03:32 +0200, Rik Stott wrote:

I beleive that the change needs to be made in the
‘@papers = Paper.find(:all)’ line in the controller,
i just do not know what to replace this line with.

I didn’t see your other posts so I’m not sure what your associations
look like but assuming it’s:

Paper -> belongs_to :author

@papers = Paper.find_all_by_author_id(params[:id]

and then you can get rid of the find on Author.

HTH,
Bill

3

Hey Bill,

I tried that, but it came out with an error saying:

“undefined method `find_all_by_author_id’ for #Class:0x7380e94”

I cannot delete the find on the author because that is required for a
different table on the page.

I then realised it should have been ‘find_all_by_author’, because the
field in the papers page is called ‘author’, not author_id.

the problem I now have is that the page will display, with the table,
but there is no records being shown.

the author field in the authors table is named ‘name’, should i change
this to ‘author’ also?

thanks for your help

bill walton wrote:

Hi Rik,

On Fri, 2009-04-03 at 03:32 +0200, Rik Stott wrote:

I beleive that the change needs to be made in the
‘@papers = Paper.find(:all)’ line in the controller,
i just do not know what to replace this line with.

I didn’t see your other posts so I’m not sure what your associations
look like but assuming it’s:

Paper -> belongs_to :author

@papers = Paper.find_all_by_author_id(params[:id]

and then you can get rid of the find on Author.

HTH,
Bill

4

I’ve sussed it.

by now I have changed the field in paper from :author, to :name. I’ve
done a lot of work and can’t be bothered back tracking everything for
just the sake of changing it back. it works like this anyway so it
doesn’t matter.

once I had changed the name of the authors field on the papers table to
:name, the code I typed into the controller to replace the line was:

“@papers = Paper.find_all_by_name(params = @author[:name])”

this works :slight_smile: thanks for your aid Bill

5

Hi Rik,

On Fri, 2009-04-03 at 04:42 +0200, Rik Stott wrote:

this works :slight_smile: thanks for your aid Bill

You’re welcome. Glad you got it working.

Best regards,
Bill