EmphasizedInsanity at /life

Background

My current project consists over a simple type of a price quotation system, the user owns parts or products for that matter, and creates a quote for who ever requests one.

i created 3 models

• IncomingQuote – Basic quote details, where to send, comments etc.
• QuoteItem – Quoted product meta data (quantity, price etc.)
• QuotePart – The actual reference to the part in stock, (part number, serial, condition).

Incoming_quote accepts_nested_attributes_for :quote_items and QuoteItem belongs_to :quote_part.

Problem

On the QuoteItem model, i added a before_create callback that will initializes/updates the associated QuotePart instance:

def assign_quote_part

    if self.quote_part.present?

      self.quote_part.update_attributes(:pn => self.pn, :condition_id => self.condition_id)

    else

      self.build_quote_part(:pn => self.pn, :condition_id => self.condition_id)

    end

end

*QuoteItem*’s tests passed, proving that the associated QuotePart is being created when creating a new QuoteItem, but the IncomingQuotesControllerTest#create tests failed, cause no QuoteItem was created.

After making sure it’s not a Factory/test syntax error, i tried manually to create a new IncomingQuote and see what is going on, and found out that:

1. When an IncomingQuote is saved, all the nested quote_items were created as well
2. The QuotePart for each QuoteItem was not created.

I added some debug prints to make sure that there are no validation errors on the initialization of the QuotePart, and indeed there were none.

i added a after_create callback to QuoteItem, and checked if the associated QuotePart was created and saved, i found that it was indeed initialized, but was not saved! (new_record? => true).

Possible Cause

I don’t know yet, i think it has something to do with the fact that i am saving 3 levels of initialized associations (IncomingQuote builds QuoteItem that each of them builds QuotePart) and that for some reason the 2nd level association (QuoteItem), is not saving the initialized associations while being saved on it’s own.

Solution

i simply added an after_create callback on QuoteItem to ensure that the associated QuotePart is saved.

def ensure_quote_part_saved

    if self.quote_part.present? && self.quote_part.new_record?

      self.quote_part.save

    end

end

Not the cleanest way to do it, but it works. Probably will head on it on the next Bugmash.