Did you render the action or redirect? If you redirect, you effectively refresh your instance variables, and your error object disappears.

Do you get a cleverly named URL for free in this case? Something like message_url(@message, @user)

I’m still putzing around with map.resources :messages AND map.resources :users { |user| user.resources :messages }
which lets you do BOTH ways.

For one, I don’t see the significance of: GET /users/1/messages/3
How is this not the same as: GET /messages/3

The simple cases look absolutely alluring. Do associated REST URLs have the same beauty?

I just looked at the resource generatory Kastner mentioned and ripped two lines of code out of it & dumped it into my controller (which is basically identical to the example you posted above).

I used to handle my ‘new’ and ‘edit’ actions in the same function (called ‘edit’). If an ID was passed in as a param, it would edit that ID, If no ID was passed in, it would create a new record.

The ’save!’ function throws an exception instead of returning ‘false’ like ’save’ does…so we need to ‘rescue’ that exception. The new RESTful stuff breaks that logic, as you have obviously found out…

Here is my original code (generated from ‘crud2_generator’ with SLIGHT modifications):

def create
@person = Person.new(params[:person])

@person.save!

respond_to do |format|
format.html do
flash[:notice] = “#{@person.first_name} has been added to the database…”
redirect_to :action => “index”
end
format.js # Renders create.rjs
format.xml do
headers["Location"] = person_url(@person)
render(:nothing => true, :status => “201 Created”)
end
end
end

In order to get the error messages ‘we have all grown to love’ back, all you need to do is take this code & throw it at the end of the function above:

rescue ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid
render :action => ‘new’
(*taken from: “tech’s resource generator”:http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/resource_generator/generators/resource/templates/controller.rb)

As long as you have the ‘error_messages_for’ call in you view…they should show up again now.

I have not used this generator yet. I am currently using ‘crud2_generator’ to create my models/controllers, but adding these two lines of code took care of it for me.

I hope that helps…

To cite some of your code:

# gets called when for POSTs to /people
def create
@person = Person.new(params[:person])
@person.save!
respond_to do |format|
format.html do
flash[:notice] = “Person was successfuly created”
redirect_to person_url(@person)
end
format.js
end
end

In here I see that you’re not dealing with the exception at all, are we just giving up the entire nice error handling functionality of Rails for extra restfullness, or am I missing something obvious?