Rails access serialized array in form

Question

I have the following class:

class Question < ActiveRecord::Base
  serialize :choices
end

I want my questions to have a set of choices that the user can select, and I'm storing them inside the question record to avoid a second database query. I'm trying to set my form so that the text for each choice is editable by a user. This is the tag I'm using for the input:

<input name="question[choices][]" type="text" />

My permit function is this:

def question_params
  params.require(:question).permit(:category_id, :content, :choices, :answer_id)
end

My choices array isn't getting set. What am I doing wrong here?

Yes. This is a dummy sentence to get by SO's comment length minimum. =) — kid_drew, Dec 05 '13 at 18:55
Can you share your strong parameters `permit` call? I'm thinking this may be related to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16549382/how-to-permit-an-array-with-strong-parameters — Peter Alfvin, Dec 05 '13 at 19:01
Peter, your link pointed me in the right direction. If you want to answer the question, I'll give you the credit. — kid_drew, Dec 05 '13 at 20:29

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:28

With the introduction of strong parameters, arbitrary non-scalar values are no longer accepted as input values. If you want to pass an array of scalars, however, you can declare that in your permit statement as in:

params.require(:question).permit(:category_id, :content, :choices => [], :answer_id)

This can be a difficult problem to detect, however, as the input values can simply be ignored without an error in some cases (the specifics of which I don't recall off-hand).

This is discussed further in how to permit an array with strong parameters

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 05 '13 at 19:51

0

Try below.. (Controller code?)

class Question < ActiveRecord::Base
  serialize :choices,Array
end

answered Dec 05 '13 at 19:51

beck03076

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Rails access serialized array in form

2 Answers2