Working With Rails

Let’s say I wanted a to have all of my Thing objects in a selection list. Then, when a thing is selected, it is passed to page.html.erb, and the name of that thing is displayed. Here’s what I have:

class MainController < ApplicationController def index @things = Thing.find_all_things #method in thing.rb end

def page
  @thing = Thing.find(params[:id])
end
end

Then in index.html.erb:

<% form_for :thing, :url => { :action => :page} do |form| %> <%= form.select :thing, @things, #contains all things :prompt => “Select a thing” %>

<= submit_tag "Submit", :class => "submit" %>
< end %>

Then in page.html.erb:

<%= @thing.name %>

One problem is that in the selection list it only displays the object, not the name—<thing:0x465baf4>. A solution would be to display by the names, and then find_by_name in page.html.erb, but that seems like extraneous work.

The second problem is that it doesn’t work.

Thank you for any help.

EDIT: can’t figure out how to format this thing correctly. All apologies.