How to submit multiple NEW items via Rails 3.2 mass-assignment

As others have mentioned, the [] should contain a key for new records because otherwise it is mixing a hash with an array type. You can set this with the child_index option on fields_for.

f.fields_for :items, Item.new, child_index: "NEW_ITEM" # ...

I usually do this using the object_id instead to ensure it is unique in case there are multiple new items.

item = Item.new
f.fields_for :items, item, child_index: item.object_id # ...

Here's an abstract helper method that does this. This assumes there is a partial with the name of item_fields which it will render.

def link_to_add_fields(name, f, association)
  new_object = f.object.send(association).klass.new
  id = new_object.object_id
  fields = f.fields_for(association, new_object, child_index: id) do |builder|
    render(association.to_s.singularize + "_fields", f: builder)
  end
  link_to(name, '#', class: "add_fields", data: {id: id, fields: fields.gsub("\n", "")})
end

You can use it like this. The arguments are: the name of the link, the parent's form builder, and the name of the association on the parent model.

<%= link_to_add_fields "Add Item", f, :items %>

And here is some CoffeeScript to listen to the click event of that link, insert the fields, and update the object id with the current time to give it a unique key.

jQuery ->
  $('form').on 'click', '.add_fields', (event) ->
    time = new Date().getTime()
    regexp = new RegExp($(this).data('id'), 'g')
    $(this).before($(this).data('fields').replace(regexp, time))
    event.preventDefault()

That code is taken from this RailsCasts Pro episode which requires a paid subscription. However, there is a full working example freely available on GitHub.

Update: I want to point out that inserting a child_index placeholder is not always necessary. If you do not want to use JavaScript to insert new records dynamically, you can build them up ahead of time:

def new
  @project = Project.new
  3.times { @project.items.build }
end

<%= f.fields_for :items do |builder| %>

Rails will automatically insert an index for the new records so it should just work.

So, I was not happy with the solution I saw most often, which was to generate a pseudo-index for new elements, either on the server or in client-side JS. This feels like a kludge, especially in light of the fact that Rails/Rack is perfectly capable of parsing lists of items so long as they all use empty brackets ([]) as the index. Here's an approximation of the code I wound up with:

# note that this is NOT f.fields_for.
fields_for 'parent[children_attributes][]', child, index: nil do |f|
  f.label :name
  f.text_field :name
  # ...
end

Ending the field name prefix with [], coupled with the index: nil option, disables the index generation Rails so helpfully tries to provide for persisted objects. This snippet works for both new and saved objects. The resulting form parameters, since they consistently use [], are parsed into an array in the params:

params[:parent][:children_attributes] # => [{"name" => "..."}, {...}]

The Parent#children_attributes= method generated by accepts_nested_attributes_for :children deals with this array just fine, updating changed records, adding new ones (ones lacking an "id" key), and removing the ones with the "_destroy" key set.

I'm still bothered that Rails makes this so difficult, and that I had to revert to a hardcoded field name prefix string instead of using e.g. f.fields_for :children, index: nil. For the record, even doing the following:

f.fields_for :children, index: nil, child_index: nil do |f| ...

...fails to disable field index generation.

I'm considering writing a Rails patch to make this easier, but I don't know if enough people care or if it would even be accepted.

EDIT: User @Macario has clued me in to why Rails prefers explicit indices in field names: once you get into three layers of nested models, there needs to be a way to discriminate which second-level model a third-level attribute belongs to.