How to assign one category to a post with radio buttons, in Rails?

Question

Hello, newbie here, first post.

I just spent like 4 hours trying to assign one category to a post (trying out a regular blog thing) via radio buttons, to no avail. The association is working fine, and ultimately I managed to get it working with a select menu, but for some reason it seems radio buttons are simply not meant for that.

I really don't like using a select menu for that because I only have 4 categories and having to click twice to select a single one is 1 click too many. So I would really like to use radio buttons instead.

I checked out the other question on the subject and searched the web senseless but it only helped me get a more diverse array of errors: Undefined methods, AssociationTypeMismatch, category_ids of 0, you name it. So I gave up for today and decided to create a account and see if anyone can crack this one. Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Here we go. In RailsCasts Episode 17 Ryan uses habtm and checkboxes to do this kind of thing. I modified it to use belongs_to and radio buttons. Thanks for the exercise.

> script/generate scaffold category category_name:string
> script/generate scaffold post post_name:string, post_content:text, category_id:integer

Post Model

Class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
   belongs_to :category
End

Post Create View (removed the default textbox for category_id)

...
<p>
 <% for category in Categories.find(:all) %>
   <div>
       <%= radio_button_tag "post[category_id]", category.id, @post.category_id == category.id %><%= category.category_name %>
   </div>
 <% end %>
</p>