Ruby on Rails: Adding a user for login to my existing app killed my index

Question

I have an app that I've been developing that has so far only been a single user environment. I finally got to the point where I needed to add multi-user capabilities so I followed the railscast on authlogic to get a simple login.

I then added a has_many :items and accepts_nested_attributes_for :items and a belongs_to :user to the correct models. I then dropped the database and setup and then migrated it. I also added a user_id column to all my nested models.

After that, when I click on the "Create new item" link, I go to the new page and create a new item. When I go back to the item_index page, it's not showing up anymore. I can go to localhost/item/1 and see the record, so I know that it's being created, but when I try to view it in my item_index.html.erb it doesn't show up anymore.

Here's the basic loop that was working before I added the user. (It's rendering into a table)

<% for item in @items %>
    <%= link_to item.name, item %>
<% end %>

I imagine that the loop is what's wrong, but I'm not entirely sure.

Thanks

edit: Here's what's happening in my index method in my item controller:

   def index
     @items = Item.search params[:search]
     if @items.nil?
       @items = Item.all
     end
   end

I have the weird if nil? thing because I'm using thinking-sphinx and it was failing sometimes if the index was empty.

edit2:

If I change the index to have just

def index
   @items = Item.all
end

Everything shows up. So that means that it has to do with thinking sphinx messing with my render

edit3: in thinking-sphinx fashion, I did some things unrelated to it, and it magically works again.

Answer 1

Thinking Sphinx is going to be returning an empty result set [], when you try to iterate over this empty set you're not going to get any items shown.

To my knowledge, Thinking Sphinx will never return nil for a search result.

Perhaps try this instead:

if @items.empty?
  @items = Item.all
end