[ruby-on-rails] form_for with nested resources

I have a two-part question about form_for and nested resources. Let's say I'm writing a blog engine and I want to relate a comment to an article. I've defined a nested resource as follows:

map.resources :articles do |articles|
    articles.resources :comments
end

The comment form is in the show.html.erb view for articles, underneath the article itself, for instance like this:

<%= render :partial => "articles/article" %>
<% form_for([ :article, @comment]) do |f| %>
    <%= f.text_area :text %>
    <%= submit_tag "Submit" %>
<%  end %>

This gives an error, "Called id for nil, which would mistakenly etc." I've also tried

<% form_for @article, @comment do |f| %>

Which renders correctly but relates f.text_area to the article's 'text' field instead of the comment's, and presents the html for the article.text attribute in that text area. So I seem to have this wrong as well. What I want is a form whose 'submit' will call the create action on CommentsController, with an article_id in the params, for instance a post request to /articles/1/comments.

The second part to my question is, what's the best way to create the comment instance to begin with? I'm creating a @comment in the show action of the ArticlesController, so a comment object will be in scope for the form_for helper. Then in the create action of the CommentsController, I create new @comment using the params passed in from the form_for.

Thanks!

Be sure to have both objects created in controller: @post and @comment for the post, eg:

@post = Post.find params[:post_id]
@comment = Comment.new(:post=>@post)

Then in view:

<%= form_for([@post, @comment]) do |f| %>

Be sure to explicitly define the array in the form_for, not just comma separated like you have above.

You don't need to do special things in the form. You just build the comment correctly in the show action:

class ArticlesController < ActionController::Base
  ....
  def show
    @article = Article.find(params[:id])
    @new_comment = @article.comments.build
  end
  ....
end

and then make a form for it in the article view:

<% form_for @new_comment do |f| %>
   <%= f.text_area :text %>
   <%= f.submit "Post Comment" %>
<% end %>

by default, this comment will go to the create action of CommentsController, which you will then probably want to put redirect :back into so you're routed back to the Article page.