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Trouble with `delegate` in Rails when trying to access nested attributes

👀 Views: 428 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-03
ruby rails active-record delegate Ruby

I'm having a hard time understanding I'm migrating some code and I'm trying to figure out I'm working on a personal project and I’m working with an scenario where I’m trying to use the `delegate` method in Rails to simplify access to nested attributes, but it doesn’t seem to work as expected..... I have two models: `Author` and `Book`. The `Author` model has many `Books`, and I want to delegate the `title` attribute from `Book` to `Author` so that I can access it in a simpler way. Here’s how my models are set up: ```ruby class Author < ApplicationRecord has_many :books delegate :title, to: :books, prefix: true, allow_nil: true end class Book < ApplicationRecord belongs_to :author end ``` I expected to be able to call `author.title` and get the title of the first book associated with that author, but when I do that, I get a `NoMethodError: undefined method 'title' for #<ActiveRecord::Associations::CollectionProxy...>`. I’ve tried using `delegate :title, to: :books.first` as well, but that results in `NoMethodError: undefined method 'first' for nil:NilClass` when the author has no books. I want to keep it clean and avoid checking if books exist every time I need to access the title. Is there a way to make this delegation work correctly? I’m using Rails 6.1.4 and Ruby 2.7.4. Any help would be greatly appreciated! What's the best practice here? I'm working on a web app that needs to handle this. How would you solve this? What am I doing wrong? Any suggestions would be helpful.