#6741 Rails 3: find_or_create_by gives ArgumentError (Unknown keys) with hash parameter in has_many - Ruby on Rails

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#6741 new

Rails 3: find_or_create_by gives ArgumentError (Unknown keys) with hash parameter in has_many

Reported by Ary Borenszweig | April 25th, 2011 @ 06:08 AM

This is the code that fails, you can put it in a main.rb file and run it:

require 'rubygems'
require 'active_record'

ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(:adapter => 'sqlite3', :database => ':memory:')

ActiveRecord::Schema.define do
  create_table "countries", :force => true do |t|
    t.string "name"
  end

  create_table "people", :force => true do |t|
    t.integer "country_id"
    t.string "name"
    t.integer "age"
  end
end

class Country < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :people
end

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :country
end

country = Country.create! :name => 'Foo'
country.people.find_or_create_by_name 'bar', :age => 30

I get

/Users/asterite/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p136@geochat-rails/gems/activesupport-3.0.3/lib/active_support/core_ext/hash/keys.rb:43:in `assert_valid_keys': Unknown key(s): age (ArgumentError)
    from /Users/asterite/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p136@geochat-rails/gems/activerecord-3.0.3/lib/active_record/relation/spawn_methods.rb:107:in `apply_finder_options'
    from /Users/asterite/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p136@geochat-rails/gems/activerecord-3.0.3/lib/active_record/base.rb:934:in `construct_finder_arel'
    from /Users/asterite/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p136@geochat-rails/gems/activerecord-3.0.3/lib/active_record/base.rb:986:in `method_missing'
    from /Users/asterite/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p136@geochat-rails/gems/activerecord-3.0.3/lib/active_record/associations/association_collection.rb:443:in `block in method_missing'
    from /Users/asterite/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p136@geochat-rails/gems/activerecord-3.0.3/lib/active_record/base.rb:1121:in `with_scope'
    from /Users/asterite/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p136@geochat-rails/gems/activerecord-3.0.3/lib/active_record/associations/association_proxy.rb:203:in `with_scope'
    from /Users/asterite/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p136@geochat-rails/gems/activerecord-3.0.3/lib/active_record/associations/association_collection.rb:439:in `method_missing'
    from /Users/asterite/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p136@geochat-rails/gems/activerecord-3.0.3/lib/active_record/associations/association_proxy.rb:151:in `send'
    from /Users/asterite/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p136@geochat-rails/gems/activerecord-3.0.3/lib/active_record/associations/association_collection.rb:425:in `method_missing'
    from main.rb:27:in `<main>'

Comments and changes to this ticket

Ben Orenstein April 25th, 2011 @ 03:42 PM
- Importance changed from “” to “Low”
Ben Orenstein April 25th, 2011 @ 03:43 PM
- State changed from “new” to “open”
Ben Orenstein April 25th, 2011 @ 03:43 PM
- State changed from “open” to “new”
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Ary Borenszweig April 25th, 2011 @ 03:53 PM
Why low priority? The beauty of Rails 3 is to work with associations like this, and I can see many use cases where you would want to find or create by an attribute and initialize it with other attributes. It's not an edge case, I already wanted to use this in two projects I started recently.
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Matthew Daubert April 25th, 2011 @ 05:00 PM
Ary,

I suspect the low priority designation is because you an accomplish the same task by changing the last line. I plugged this into your test case and it seems to work fine.
```
country.people.find_or_create_by_name('bar') { |p| p.age = 30 }
```
http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Base.html
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Flurin April 28th, 2011 @ 10:00 AM
That last one doesn't work either, the block never get's called.
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Nick Howard May 1st, 2011 @ 11:34 PM
I looked into this. What it looks like is happening is that ActiveRecord::Association::CollectionProxy's way of handling find_or_create_by calls is written in a manner that does not allow for setting additional attributes when the lookup fails. Any arguments to it are passed to a find_by_ call instead of being used to attributes for creating a new object if it didn't exist.

I put together a patch for rails master.

https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/358

What do you think?
- patch.diff 3.7 KB
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Nick Howard May 6th, 2011 @ 10:31 PM
This has been merged into master https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/f098c80947dee1b420cea4ca647d1...
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Nick Howard May 6th, 2011 @ 10:31 PM
- Assigned user set to “Aaron Patterson”