I can't cope with custom action in controller

Question

In Tasks controller I have action:

  def destroy_all
    current_user.tasks.destroy
    redirect_to root_path
  end

My db schema looks like below:

  create_table "tasks", force: true do |t|
    t.string   "content"
    t.boolean  "done"
    t.datetime "created_at"
    t.datetime "updated_at"
    t.string   "users_id"
  end

And I have relation: Tasks belongs_to User and User has_many Tasks. By action destory_all I want to destroy all current user's tasks.

But when I click:

<%= link_to "delete all", { controller: 'tasks', action: 'destroy_all'}, method: 'delete' %>

Nothing happen. User still have all his tasks.

Log from server console:

Started DELETE "/tasks/destroy_all" for 127.0.0.1 at 2014-10-04 23:29:27 +0200
Processing by TasksController#destroy_all as HTML
  Parameters: {"authenticity_token"=>"fVPDi6bczNXlfhjCDI4pJhMUm3cjv6TN1Ny/ulUO4YQ="}
  User Load (0.2ms)  SELECT  "users".* FROM "users"  WHERE "users"."id" = 2  ORDER BY "users"."id" ASC LIMIT 1
Redirected to http://localhost:3000/
Completed 302 Found in 31ms (ActiveRecord: 0.2ms)


Started GET "/" for 127.0.0.1 at 2014-10-04 23:29:27 +0200
Processing by PagesController#home as HTML
  User Load (0.2ms)  SELECT  "users".* FROM "users"  WHERE "users"."id" = 2  ORDER BY "users"."id" ASC LIMIT 1
  Task Load (0.1ms)  SELECT "tasks".* FROM "tasks"  WHERE "tasks"."done" = 'f' AND "tasks"."user_id" = 2
  Rendered tasks/index.html.erb within layouts/application (2.4ms)
  Rendered layouts/_userbar.html.erb (0.2ms)
  Rendered layouts/_menu.html.erb (0.1ms)
Completed 200 OK in 46ms (Views: 44.3ms | ActiveRecord: 0.3ms)

And routes.rb file

  resources :tasks do
    collection do
      delete :destroy_all
    end
  end

EDIT: I updated log and link_to method and I added routes.rb file.

Answer 1

First, your task table needs the field "user_id", not "users_id". This will probably fix your problem right away.

However, you're missing the power of has_many! Just do this:

current_user.tasks.destroy_all

Calling "current_user.tasks" gets a list of the user's task for you, and you can then call "destroy" on them as I did above. This is cleaner and easier to read.

I hope this helps!

Answer 2

According to your schema, users_id is a String which might be "1" or "2". But the current_user.id is Integer which might be 1 or 2.

In this case, you will find nothing in your ActiveRecord because it queries for items that id is a string, which you actually send an integer.

Thus try:

Task.destroy_all(users_id: current_user.id.to_s)

to match the type.

==============================

However, your structure is complicated and it will be hard to maintain in the future. I suggest you do the following:

1. In Task model, change users_id to user_id because it only belongs to a single user.
2. Changer the type of the user_id to integer because it is id, and logically it only contains numeric value.
3. As Jaime suggests, make use of rails convention in has_many and write something like current_user.tasks.delete_all to keep your code clean and more readable.