Need help in troubleshooting association in Rails !!

Question

I'm new to rails and and I'm on the urge of learning Associations.
I'm using Rails version 3.
I have a user model and post model.My need is as below:-

Models

class User < ActiveRecord::Base  
  has_many :post  
end  

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base  
  belongs_to :user  
  validates_associated :user  
end  

Schema

ActiveRecord::Schema.define(:version => 20101016171256) do  
  create_table "posts", :force => true do |t|  
    t.integer  "sell_or_buy"  
    t.string   "title"  
    t.text     "body"  
    t.integer  "user_id"  <<<<<<< I thought this will help to associate to user model.  
    t.datetime "created_at"  
    t.datetime "updated_at"  
  end  

  create_table "users", :force => true do |t|  
    t.string   "name"  
    t.string   "email"  
    t.string   "password"  
    t.integer  "rank"  
    t.datetime "created_at"  
    t.datetime "updated_at"  
  end  
end

I thought keeping a user_id field and the belongs_to association will do my job, but
when i tried to display all the posts belonging to a user as follows:

<%= @user.posts %>  

in my show.html.erb file. But I get only the following display:-

Name:  saran  

Email: [email protected]  

Password: abcd  

Rank:    
Edit | Back  
Posts  
#<Post:0xb69f47f8>#<Post:0xb69f3024>   

I want to display the associated posts "title" and "body" in a readable format.

Also I'm able to create a post with a user_id in which no user exists!. The validates_associated :user is also not working, Please help me out.

Answer 1

You are getting the posts as expected in your view... So I'm not sure I understand that part of your question. As to the other part, validates_associated just ensures that the attached object is valid itself, and not if it exists at all. For that you want validates_presence_of. See the docs.

Answer 2

Its

class User
  has_many :posts
end

Not

has_many :post

Edit and Update your results.

Answer 3

I wrote the following partial for my purpose and it works well :).
Thanks for all your inputs.

<% for post in @user.posts do %>    
   <h3> <%= post.title %> </h3>   
   <%= post.body %>   
<% end %>