Bug #2: Problem with updating user object

The bug was found in the model side as I was trying to update the user object by doing:

@user = User.update(params[:id], {
  :fname => params[:user][:fname],
  :lname => params[:user][:lname],
  :email => params[:user][:email] })

Whenever I tried to update, I'd get this error:

ArgumentError in UserController#update wrong number of arguments (2 for 4)

Could not figure out what was wrong with it from googling. So once again I decided to hop onto my trusty real-time help solution: irc. I got suggested to try this method of updating:

@user = User.find(params[:id])
@user.update_attributes({
:fname => params[:user][:fname],
:lname => params[:user][:lname],
:email => params[:user][:email]}) if @user != nil

This seemed to work perfectly. I still haven't figured out what was the problem with the other one. Perhaps its because I didn't provide the other two parameters that's in the table definition: password_hash and password_salt. I'm not sure.

Bug #1: AJAX checking in certain actions

So I came across a bug as I was testing my newly written code to check whether handles and usernames have already been registered in the database. This worked fine when I want to sign up. However, when I want to update a user's profile, it would not let me update my profile with my existing email because the email already exists in the database. Pretty obvious that there's a bug there.

So when I did my AJAX checking, I had to determine what type of action I was doing (i.e. signing up, updating...). I had a parameter called action which would be sent in the query string, telling the controller what kind of action I am doing. The problem is, whenever I did that, my code for some reason could not recognise what kind of action I'm performing. When I printed out params[:action], it gave me the controller's method name.

Out of frustration, I hopped onto irc to get some real-time help. Turns out that action was a reserved name used for routing purposes, which determines which method of the controller you're calling to. D'oh! Obviously I should've known this as my code is scattered with :action => "something".

So I changed the parameter name to actiontype and it worked perfectly!