Ruby on Rails - Creating a profile when user is created

Question

So basically I have wrote my own authentication instead of using a gem so I have access to the controllers. My user creation works fine but when my users are created I want to also create a profile record for them in my profile model. I have got it mostly working I just cant seem to pass the ID from the new user into the the new profile.user_id. Here is my code for the user creation in my user model.

  def create
    @user = User.new(user_params)
    if @user.save
        @profile = Profile.create
        profile.user_id = @user.id
        redirect_to root_url, :notice => "You have succesfully signed up!"
    else
        render "new"
    end

The profile is creating it is just not adding a user_id from the newly created user. If anyone could help it would be appreciated.

Answer 1

You should really do this as a callback in the user model:

User
  after_create :build_profile

  def build_profile
    Profile.create(user: self) # Associations must be defined correctly for this syntax, avoids using ID's directly.
  end
end

This will now always create a profile for a newly created user.

Your controller then gets simplified to:

def create
  @user = User.new(user_params)
  if @user.save
    redirect_to root_url, :notice => "You have succesfully signed up!"
  else
    render "new"
  end
end

Answer 2

This is now much easier in Rails 4.

You only need to add the following line to your user model:

after_create :create_profile

And watch how rails automagically creates a profile for the user.

Answer 3

You have two errors here:

@profile = Profile.create
profile.user_id = @user.id

The second line should be:

@profile.user_id = @user.id

The first line creates the profile and your are not 're-saving' after the assignment of the user_id.

Change these lines to this:

@profile = Profile.create(user_id: @user.id)