I'm rendering a form with serialized attributes. The attribute serialization works fine under normal usage, but now i'm trying to serialize a hash. The view code looks like the following
<%= @item.seasonality_of_sales_pct.each do |key, value| %>
<%= eval("f.label :'seasonality_of_sales_pct[:#{key}]'") %>
<%= eval("f.text_field :'seasonality_of_sales_pct[:#{key}]'") %>
<% end %>
The error I'm getting is undefined method 'seasonality_of_sales_pct[:January]' for #<Item:0x007f01083edd38>. However, the line that is throwing the error is the second eval. The first eval evaluates just fine. I'm baffled as to why this might be happening.
In the controller, I am setting up an attribute like the following
@item.seasonality_of_sales_pct = {January: nil, February: nil, March: nil, September: nil}
Another question that could maybe be answered in the comments is: How bad does this code smell? I'm not sure how the rails community feels about metaprogramming like this. It hurts me a bit to do it, but seems to work most of the time
I wanted to be a bit more thorough than Khaled's answer, which was sort of right. The reason that the first eval statement didn't cause the error was because f.label doesn't care what you give it. <%= f.label :fake_stuff %> will just create a label called Fake Stuff. I'm still not quite sure why the attribute didn't work. If I had f.text_field :seasonality_of_sales_pct, I got a text box full of my hash. Also, I got the labels to display the correct values.
I absolutely did not need to use evals here (I can hope it was only a moment of weakness). Just do
<%= f.text_field :'seasonality_of_sales_pct[:"#{key}"]' %>