Using NestedSortable with Ancestry gem and Mongoid - ruby-on-rails-3

Question

trying to incorporate nested sortable into my rails app.
I'm using Mongoid and the Ancestry gem, and I'm trying to make a page that updates the parent_id of a category on drag and drop with Nested-Sortable.
Been trying to experiment, but don't really understand what NestedSortable spits out in order to create a controller that will read it.
My controller has:
def sort
Category.update_all({parent_id: params[:parent_id].to_i})
render nothing: true
end
Routes:
resources :symbols, :as => :categories, :controller => :categories do
collection {post :sort}
end
Reorder.js.coffee:
jQuery ->
$('.reorder-tree').nestedSortable
handle: '.handle'
items: 'li'
toleranceElement: '> div'
update: ->
$.post($(this).data('update-url'), $(this).nestedSortable('serialize'))
And my reorder view spits out something like:
<ol class=reorder-tree>
<li id="category_513d372b10188f9b6b000014"><div>
<i class="icon-move handle"></i>
Chickne
<span class="btn-group show-on-hover">
<a href="/symbols/new?parent_id=chickne" class="btn btn-micro" data-remote="true" title="Add Sub-Category"><i class="icon-plus"></i>
</a>
<a href="/symbols/chickne/edit" class="btn btn-micro"><i class="icon-pencil"></i>
</a>
<a href="/symbols/chickne" class="btn btn-micro" data-method="delete" data-remote="true" rel="nofollow" title="Delete Category"><i class="icon-remove"></i>
</a>
</span>
</div>
<ol class="visible"><li id="category_513d373310188f9b6b000016"><div>
<i class="icon-move handle"></i>
Smoking Babies
<span class="btn-group show-on-hover">
<a href="/symbols/new?parent_id=smoking-babies" class="btn btn-micro" data-remote="true" title="Add Sub-Category"><i class="icon-plus"></i>
</a>
<a href="/symbols/smoking-babies/edit" class="btn btn-micro"><i class="icon-pencil"></i>
</a>
<a href="/symbols/smoking-babies" class="btn btn-micro" data-method="delete" data-remote="true" rel="nofollow" title="Delete Category"><i class="icon-remove"></i>
</a>
</span>
</div>
<ol class="hide"></ol>
</li>
</ol></li>
</ol>
Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

Answer 1

After seriously playing around with the array I was getting from Nested Sortable,
I was able to make this work by using this in my controller:
def sort
# html = "Env: #{Rails.env}. "
# infor = params[:category]
params[:category].each do |id, attr|
thisCat = params[:category][id]
#category = Category.where(:_id => id).first
# html << "ID= #{id} , thisCat= #{thisCat} Name= #{#category.name} Parent= #{#category.parent_id} ; "
unless thisCat == "null"
#category.parent_id = thisCat.to_s
#category.save
end
end
# flash[:alert] = html
# flash[:error] = infor
# render nothing: true
end
You can see what I commented out after I got it to work; that's all my debugging flash statements.
Cheers!