Accessing a has_one associations' attributes

Question

I\'m still quite new to Rails so hopefully this isn\'t a silly question.

I have two models: User and Chore. User has_one chore, and Chore belongs to User

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Answer 1

It's because not every user has a chore associated with it.

There are a few ways you can deal with this; I'm partial to the iteration pattern using Array() to coerce a collection. You can do this in your view:

<% Array(user.chore).each do |chore| %>
  <%= chore.name %>
  <%= chore.done? %>
<% end %>

Array() will instantiate an empty array if chore is nil, meaning nothing happens when you try to iterate over it. If a chore is present, it will iterate over [chore].

The benefit of this pattern is that it doesn't violate Tell don't ask. Asking an object if it is nil? is also possible, but it's more of a procedural technique that doesn't take advantage of Ruby's strong object-oriented features.

Edit

As Deefour points out, this will result in a table with mismatched columns. You should probably use his solution for this case.