Ruby error: "Symbol as array index"

Question

I am writing a spec for the create method of a controller :

describe "POST create" do

    it "should create an adtag with valid params" do
      campaign = Campaign.make

      campaign_attributes = Hash.new
      campaign_attributes[:adtag_attributes] = Hash.new
      campaign_attributes[:adtag_attributes][:code] = "<h1>Sample code</h1>"

      post 'create', { :id => campaign.id, :campaign => campaign_attributes }
    end

end

But when I run it, I get the error "Symbol as array index" in the controller, when it tries to process this code :

params[:campaign][:adtag_attributes].each_with_index do |attributes,index|
  # some code
end

Any idea ? Thanks

EDIT 1:

I haven't written the controller, but it works with manual testing. The view that calls my controller has this code:

fields_for 'campaign[adtag_attributes][]', adtag do |adtag_form|

Maybe my spec isn't good ?

EDIT 2:

Problem resolved thanks to Rishav's answer. I didn't understand that in the view, campaign[adtag_attributes][] means that campaign[adtag_attributes] is an Array.

So I just replaced

campaign_attributes = Hash.new
campaign_attributes[:adtag_attributes] = Hash.new
campaign_attributes[:adtag_attributes][:code] = "<h1>Sample code</h1>"

by

campaign_attributes = Hash.new
campaign_attributes[:adtag_attributes] = Array.new
campaign_attributes[:adtag_attributes] << { :code => "<h1>Sample code</h1>" }

and it worked out.

Rishav Rastogi · Accepted Answer · 2010-09-08 17:43:01Z

5

params[:campaign][:adtag_attributes] is a hash not an array, so when it runs "each_with_index" method on the hash it sees ":code" symbol as the index and throws that error.

You can just do this

 params[:campaign][:adtag_attributes].each do |key,value|
    #some code
 end

just change to following in the test

params[:campaign][:adtag_attributes] = [] params[:campaign][:adtag_attributes] << somedata

hopefully this works

edited Sep 8, 2010 at 17:43

answered Sep 7, 2010 at 23:42

Rishav Rastogi

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1 Comment

Jerome Dalbert Over a year ago

I haven't written the controller, but it works with manual testing. See my post edit for more details.

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