Rails 4 strong params error: no implicit conversion of Symbol into String

Question

I am importing the data from a spreadsheet to the app database.

The data is parsed by rows. Each parsed row looks like:

{:department=>{
  :school=>"Graduate School of Business",
  :name=>"Graduate School of Business",
  :program=>"MBA Program",
  :url=>"http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/mba",
  :intro=>"The Stanford MBA Program is a two-year, full-time, residential program.",
  :students_number=>"Approximately 80 annually",
  :students_with_aids_number=>nil,
  :gre_scroe=>nil,
  :toefl_score=>nil,
  :world_rank=>nil,
  :us_rank=>nil,
  :without_aid_deadline=>nil,
  :with_aid_deadline=>nil,
  :salary=>nil,
  :institute_id=>1}
}

To create a department:

 # att is the hash shown above
    department = Department.new(department_params(att))
    if !department.save
        puts "Error: \n department can't be save: #{department.errors.full_messages}"
    end

 def department_params params
   params.require(:department).permit(:name,:url,:institute_id)
 end

But I got the error:

no implicit conversion of Symbol into String

which points to

params.require(:department).permit(:name,:url,:institute_id)

How could I fix it? Thanks!

Answer 1

Getting rails-api and strong_parameters to work together

I think it'll be something very similar. You just need to include ActionController::StrongParameters not require as described in linked question.

In my case it was adding new initializer with

ActionController::API.send :include, ActionController::StrongParameters