Move validation to models / change forms to embed submodels.

[NatTuck]

I should be able to delete more than half the controller code.

[blerner]

Is this now basically done, to your satisfaction?

[NatTuck]

There's still a couple cases of obj.save && obj.save_more that should get looked at.

[blerner]

Iirc, the 'save_upload and save' pattern is because those two operations can logically be done independently of each other, and the upload has to be saved before the main record makes any sense to save...

[NatTuck]

If you have a nested association, then the saving the parent model will save the nested records as well atomically, which usually the pattern we want.

[blerner]

For some reason I recall that not working. I don't remember the details, though. I think it's because the has_one versus belongs_to relationships don't work in our favor here.

[NatTuck]

I got it working in for backwards belongs_to for the course form. You need the "accepts_nested_attributes_for" thing in the model and to get the .permit thing right in the controller.

[blerner]

These have been mostly eliminated. The only places they remain are for submissions (where we pass along a prof_override flag sometimes; this could probably be replaced by a @prof_overrides field) and registrations / registration_requests, where logically multiple things have to be saved together, and we don't have record ids yet for all of them so they can't quite all go into a single save method.

I've forced this to work for assignment uploads, where starter-file uploads now need to know their assignment id, and assignments need to know their starter-file uploads, and this kind of cyclic dependency is a pain to deal with. (This was the major sticking point for save_upload && save pattern.) But the benefits outweighed the downsides: now, all uploads related to a course are in one directory; all uploads related to a single assignment are within a subdirectory of that.

The accepts_nested_attributes_for is a red herring for the actual difficulties here.