Maintaining the nested levels while serializing a field generated using fields_for

Question

Thanks to help from people earlier, I am getting a hang of how to serialize a nested hash into a single column. While I was able to generate the form fields at multiple levels and get values of the fields back in to a string, I am unable to retain the different levels for the hash.

My hash looks like the following:

My code looks like:

 <% categoryvalue.each do |categoryproperty, categorypropertyvalue| %>
 <div>
       <%= f.fields_for :categories, categoryproperty do |categoryattribs| %>
            <%= categoryattribs.label categoryproperty %> <br/>
            <%= categoryattribs.text_field categoryproperty, :value => categorypropertyvalue %> <br/>
       <% end %>
  </div>     
 <% end %>

The final hash string in my example takes data for two categories and must look similar to the following string when it gets assigned to :categories should look like the following:

{"0" => {"Active"=>"yes", "totalproducts"=>"100", "segment"=>"Premium"}, "1" => "Active"=>"yes", "totalproducts"=>"190"}}

However, the string is coming in the following form:

{"Active"=>"yes", "totalproducts"=>"100", "segment"=>"Premium", "Active"=>"yes", "totalproducts"=>"190"} 

Is there a way to differentiate the attributes of one category from another and have two separate hashes within the main hash? Right now everything gets flattened out to a single level. This is evident in how the id and names for input fields are generated. See the sample below:

<input id="product_categories_Active" name="product[categories][Active]" size="30" type="text" value="%" /> 
<input id="product_categories_Active" name="product[categories][Active]" size="30" type="text" value="lbs" /> 

What I actually want is product[categories][0][Active] and product[categories][1][Active].

Any suggestions on how to approach this?

Answer 1

Just in case someone stumbles on this question having a similar problem, I wanted to share the final solution.

You have to use text_field_tag, select_tag etc. instead of the fields_for helper. Use a loop (.each_with_index do |key, index|) to iterate through your hash. Then basically generate a fully qualified name for each field in the format "product_categories_0_active".

I will try to write a tutorial or blog on this once I am out of the woods on my project but I think most people will figure it out from here.

Hope it helps.