In Rails, how can I automatically update a User to own a newly created object of another class within the new object's Create method?

Question

My application has Users and Dwellings. When a user creates a dwelling, the user becomes the owner

Answer 1

This was an issue with saving the user. I updated my create action in the Dwellings controller to to force a save of the user using user.save! to break the application and get an explicit error. Rails complained of a missing password (and password length) and password_confirmation. I am enforcing a presence validation on both password and password_confirmation as well as a length validation on password in my User model. I updated these validations to be enforced only on create. This solved the issue. With the validations no longer being enforced on user.save, the dwelling_id was successfully added to the user record. The newly implemented code is below.

#dwellings_controller.rb
...
def create
  @dwelling = current_user.properties.build(params[:dwelling])

  if @dwelling.save
    current_user.dwelling = @dwelling
    if current_user.save
      flash[:success] = "Woohoo! Your dwelling has been created. Welcome home!"
    else
      flash[:notice] = "You have successfully created a dwelling, but something prevented us from adding you as a roomie. Please email support so we can try to correct this for you."
    end
    redirect_to current_user
    else
      render 'new'
    end
  end
...

--

#user.rb
...
  validates :password, presence: { :on => :create }, length: { minimum: 6, :on => :create }
  validates :password_confirmation, presence: { :on => :create }