Help with this Ruby Loop

Question

Ive been staring at this for a good day now and i dont understand what ive done wrong. i want this to produce a list of activities with checkboxes, but if one of the activities is in the users_activity table then that that activities check box will be checked. However the code below displays the activity three times and chekcs all the boxes.

<fieldset>
    <table>
        <tr>
            <th>Activity ID</th>
            <th>Activity Name</th>
        </tr>
        <% @Activitys.each do |activity| %>
            <% @users_activity.each do |ua| %>
                <% if activity.id == ua.activity_id %>
                <tr>
                    <td><%= activity.id %></td>
                    <td><%= activity.activity_name%></td>
                    <td><input name="check_<%= activity.id %>" type="checkbox" checked="yes"></td>
                </tr>
                <% else %>
                <tr>
                    <td><%= activity.id %></td>
                    <td><%= activity.activity_name%></td>
                    <td><input name="check_<%= activity.id %>" type="checkbox" checked="no"></td>
                </tr>
                <% end %>
            <% end %>
        <% end %>
    </table>
</fieldset>

Its probably really easy but you know what happens when you stare at a piece of code for too long...

mikej · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-15 09:17:19Z

2

The reason all the checkboxes are checked is that the presence of the checked attribute on an HTML checkbox causes it to be checked regardless of the attribute's value. i.e. <input type="checkbox" checked="no"> results in a checked checkbox. For the checkboxes that should not be checked you need to write the code such that they do not have a checked attribute at all.

The reason that you are seeing more checkboxes than you expect is because you have the @users_activity.each loop nested inside your @Activitys.each loop and in both the if and the else case you always output a checkbox so this results in @Activitys.length * @users_activity.length checkboxes.

One solution is to collect the activity IDs of all the user activities once outside your loops i.e.

<% user_activity_ids = @users_activity.collect { |ua| ua.activity_id } %>

(you could also move this to the controller)

Then have just the @Activitys.each loop in which you generate the checkbox with something like

<input name="check_<%= activity.id %>" type="checkbox"
    <%=' checked="yes"' if user_activity_ids.include? activity.id %>>

Also, @Activitys should probably be called @activities as starting the variable name with a capital letter indicates that it is a constant in Ruby.

edited Sep 15, 2011 at 9:17

answered Sep 15, 2011 at 8:54

mikej

66.6k18 gold badges156 silver badges131 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

1 Comment

SD1990 Over a year ago

thanks dude .. and thanks for the tip about the capital letters, ill remember that now

Harry Joy · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-15 09:37:29Z

chekcs all the boxes

The reason behind all checkboxes are checked is you are using checked="no" and checked="yes". There is no such thing if your write checked in input it will check that box.

displays the activity three times

This is happening because you have loop inside a loop. So for every activity you will print a <tr> for every users_activity. What I'm saying is each activity is printed number of users_activity times. Create a separate logic to check if activity.id is equal to ua.activityId for any user and return true/false in that logic. I'm not RoR expert so I can not show for this. But this can be the logic:

for each activity do
   print activity.Id
   print activity.Name
   if(checkInUsersActivity(activity.id))
      print checked check box
   else
      print unchecked check box
end

function checkInUsersActivity(activityId) returns boolean
   for each users_activity do
      if(ua.activitId == activityId)
         return true;
   return false
end

Above is just outline. It is not the code in any language.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Help with this Ruby Loop

2 Answers 2

1 Comment

Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

2 Answers 2

1 Comment

Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related