How to use will_paginate with a nested resource in Rails?
- by Sue Petersen
I'm new to Rails, and I'm having major trouble getting will_paginate to work with a nested resource.
I have two models, Statement and Invoice. will_paginate is working on Statement, but I can't get it to work on Invoice. I know I'd doing something silly, but I can't figure it out and the examples I've found on google won't work for me.
statement.rb
class Statement < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :invoices
  def self.search(search, page)
    paginate :per_page => 19, :page => page,
      :conditions => ['company like ?', "%#{search}%"],
      :order => 'date_due DESC, company, supplier'
  end
end
statements_controller.rb  <irrelevant code clipped for readability>
def index #taken from the RAILSCAST 51, will_paginate podcast
  @statements = Statement.search(params[:search], params[:page])
end
I call this in the view like so, and it works:
  <%= will_paginate @statements %>
But I can't figure out how to get it to work for Invoices:
invoice.rb
class Invoice < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :statement
   def self.search(search, page)
     paginate :per_page => 19, :page => page,
       :conditions => ['company like ?', "%#{search}%"],
       :order => 'employee'
  end
end
invoices_controller.rb
class InvoicesController < ApplicationController
  before_filter :find_statement
  #TODO I can't get will_paginate to work w a nested resource
  def index #taken from the RAILSCAST 51, will_paginate podcast
        @invoices = Invoice.search(params[:search], params[:page])
  end
 def find_statement
    @statement_id = params[:statement_id]
    return(redirect_to(statements_url)) unless @statement_id
    @statement = Statement.find(@statement_id)
  end
end
And I try to call it like this:
    <%= will_paginate (@invoices) %
The most common error message, as I play with this, is:
"The @statements variable appears to be empty. Did you forget to pass the collection object for will_paginate?"
I don't have a clue what the problem is, or how to fix it. Thanks for any help and guidance!