Changing boolean value in Rails 3 app yields ArgumentError - ruby-on-rails-3

Question

In my Rails 3.0.5 app I have columns on my Profile model for privacy. In each User's settings, I want the user to be able to change their settings so they can determine which parts of their profile are shown. In my migration I added four boolean attributes for this. However when I try to update the value (switch between true/false) I get an ArgumentError:
ArgumentError (wrong number of arguments (1 for 2)):
app/controllers/profiles_controller.rb:162:in `edit_settings'
An example of the params passed:
{"utf8"=>"✓",
"authenticity_token"=>"0uySkgRNsIIQSX6PtXl3e0e+MXCTo4yuoU/QjuBxENw=",
"show_hometown"=>"1"}
Here is the boolean in my migration:
t.boolean :show_hometown, :default => true
Here is the controller action edit_settings I'm using to update. There are four if statements to update_attribute, but for length I'm only including two:
def edit_settings
#profile = current_user.profile
if #profile.update_attribute(:show_hometown)
redirect_to settings_path, :notice => 'Updated user information successfully.'
else
redirect_to settings_path, :notice => 'Oops, something went wrong. Please try again.'
end
...
if #profile.update_attribute(:show_current_location)
redirect_to settings_path, :notice => 'Updated user information successfully.'
else
redirect_to settings_path, :notice => 'Oops, something went wrong. Please try again.'
end
end
And the form for updating :show_hometown:
<%= form_tag({:action => "edit_settings", :controller => "profiles"}, :html => {:multipart => true }) do %>
<%= check_box_tag :show_hometown %>
<%= #user.profile.hometown %>
<% end %>
FOLLOW-UP:
If I use validations on :show_hometown and insert the following into my controller I can see the value toggle:
def edit_settings
#profile = current_user.profile
if #profile.show_hometown == true
if #profile.update_attributes(:show_hometown => false)
redirect_to settings_path
else
redirect_to settings_path, :notice => 'Oops, something went wrong. Please try again.'
end
elsif #profile.show_hometown == false
if #profile.update_attributes(:show_hometown => true)
redirect_to settings_path
else
redirect_to settings_path, :notice => 'Oops, something went wrong. Please try again.'
end
end
end
However, since I have four booleans where I'll apply the same code is there a way to handle each update in one controller action? Or do I need to create a separate action for each boolean attribute I want to update?

Answer 1

You have to tell update_attribute the column and the value:
#profile.update_attribute(:show_hometown, params[:show_hometown])
This means set the value of column show_hometown to the value in params[:show_hometown].
Note that with update_attribute validations are skipped. If you want validations to run, you have to use update_attributes:
#profile.update_attributes(:show_hometown => params[:show_hometown])
To answer your follow-up: with update_attributes you can update several columns in one call:
#profile.update_attributes({:show_hometown => !#profile.show_hometown,
:show_birthdate => !#profile.show_birthdate})
There is also a toggle method, but using that would result in 4 database calls instead of 1. It can be written in one line:
%w{show_hometown show_birthdate}.each { |attr| #profile.toggle(attr) }