Task 2 – Create a link_to for the teams in our game index page

What happens when you view http://localhost:3000/games ?

Task 3 – Migrate the database schema AND data to fit your associations

Our database stores the home_team and away_team in a string, we will need to rename these columns using a migration. Before we modify the schema we have to migrate all our existing game data. Create a migration that does the following:

1. Add two new columns to store the home team’s id and away team’s id
2. Retrieves all the games from your database
3. For each game:
   1. find the Team model for the  away team by the name stored in the away_team property
   2. find the Team model for the home team by the name stored in the home_team property
   3. If the team does not exist in the database we should create the team now
   4. Save the game we change
4. Remove the old home_game and away_game columns

Task 4 – Associate the game model to the Team

A game belongs_to an away team and belongs to a home team. If we do belongs_to :home_team rails expects there to be a model called HomeTeam. This means we need to give rails a few more hints so that home_team returns an actual team model. Lets read up on the belongs_to method a little more:

1. Read section 3.3.1 Creating Foreign Keys for belongs_to Associations in the RailsGuides on associations
2. Read about all the options for the belongs_to method in RailsBrain

So lets add the proper options so we can get belongs_to to work, here is a test that should pass when we complete this task correctly:

Task 5 – Modify the create action so the team name is a Team model before saving

The form on the game’s create and edit actions still allows the user to to type in a team name but if you try and saving this form now we will get an error. This is because params[:home_team] still has a string but the Game model now expects a Team model for both the home_game and the away_game. Let’s fix our game controller’s create action to take the string from the form and convert it to a model before passing the params to Game.create .

After we get the create action working lets do the same for the edit. We will need to modify the form html for the edit to work because now home_team returns a model and not a string. When the form renders the game it calls to_s on the team model and puts that in the text field instead of the team name. Pass the :value you want the home_team and away_team text fields to display when editing a game.

After you get the edit action working, now go back and make sure the new still works.

Task 6 – DRY up your controllers using a before_filter

Having duplicate code in the create and update action doesn’t seem right. Lets use controller filters to remove the duplication. Documentation can be found at RailsBrain.com

Here is what I did:

Also note that ActiveRecord models also have callbacks similar to controllers. Read about them here