Re: Re: Help needed understanding "fields_for" and resultant controller code

Philip Hallstrom
Wed, 29 Dec 2010 20:30:28 -0000

> Thanks for the answer Philip. It is good to get confirmation
> that I have understood things correctly.
>
>> Yes.  And it only does this if the update to @employee was successful
>> first.
>
> Is the order particularly significant in this case (i.e. that it
> attempts to update @employee first)?

No technical reason (as this is an update, not a create), but logically it would
make sense that you''d want to update them in that order.

> Obviously it would be bad to update one record and not the other, but
> won''t rails throw an error and re-render the
''edit'' view if validation
> for either @employee or @employee.department fails?

Nope.  update_attributes simply returns true/false depending on whether or not
it succeeded.  There are ways to make it raise an error, but your code
isn''t doing that.

-philip