bulk update objects using form in rails

Question

I have a person model and a quotes model. Each person can have many quotes associated with them, which in turn has things like Author, Text, Url associated with them. In practice really only one person has a quotes object but all people could potentially have one.

I'm trying to have a dirt simple bulk moderate tool on quotes. As in, users can type in quotes and an admin can go and have all of the quotes of a particular person (but like in practice, only one will have them) and check a box which sets a boolean approved to 0 or 1. When the quotes are actually displayed, they're filtered by this field.

I'm getting really mixed up trying to create a form that updates these all in bulk. I got the form to display all of them as so:

<% form_for :quotes, :html => { :method => :put }, :url => {:controller => "quote", :action => "bulk_update", }  do |quote_form| %>
   <% @person.quotes.each do |quote| %>
<p>
   <% fields_for "quotes[id][]", quote  do |fields| %>
           Text....
           <%= fields.check_box :approved %><br><br>

  <% end %>
</p>

<% end %>
<%= submit_tag 'Update' %>
<% end %>

I just have an incredibly generic thing in my bulk update controller which is basically like a normal update controller. I'm not sure what to put in there. I could try to put all the quotes which I probably should but I don't know how to get to that variable anyway because I'm doing all of this from whithin the Person view etc. The controller is osmething like this:

def bulk_update
@quote = Quote.find(params[:id])
end

I guess I'm getting confused about the ID that should be in there and what should be getting passed in. Should the person ID be part of this at all? Like I said, I don't really care if technically all quotes are displayed on that page, they don't need to be sorted by user.

I'm getting parameters that look like this:

"quotes"=>{"id"=>{"6"=>{"approved"=>"0"}, ..

but it complains about not finding a quote without an ID. I don't care about the ID since I want to bulk update all of them. It seems like this particular stucture would map several ids, but maybe (probably) i have to change my controller to compensate for that, not sure how though. It also doesn't work when I try to remove the quotes par tof the hash and just have"id"=>{"6"=>{"approved"=>"0"}, .. as my parameters.

EDIT: I found a statement called update_all, but I don't know how to selectively pass it what I need...

Answer 1

I found the following approach to be flexible specially for error handling as well:

def bulk_update
  quotes = params["quotes"]["id"]
  quotes.each do |quote_id,quote_attrs|
    quote = Quote.find(quote_id)
    quote.update_attributes(quote_attrs)
    # Other logic of interest like error handling
    # . . .
  end
  # Don't forget to render or redirect to the proper view
end

Update

The proper way to do this is by moving the update logic to the model:

class QuotesController < ApplicationController
  def bulk_update
    errors = Quote.bulk_update(params["quotes"]["id"])
    # Other logic of interest like error handling
    # . . . 
    # Don't forget to render or redirect to the proper view
  end
end

class Quote < ActiveRecord::Base
  def bulk_update
    errors = {}
    quotes.each do |quote_id,quote_attrs|
      quote = Quote.find(quote_id)
      unless quote.update_attributes(quote_attrs)
        errors[quote_id] = qoute.errors
      end 
    end
    errors
  end
end