Rails - Associations

The organization of your profile instance is nil so when @profile.organization.title call it actually call nil.title and it is throwing the error(undefined methodtitle' for nil:NilClass`)

You can use try to overcome in view level

<%= @profile.organisation.try(:title) %> 

Or you can give a validation check to overcome nil on title column on model level

on organization model

 class Organisation < ActiveRecord::Base validates :title, prescence: true end 

<%= @profile.try(:organisation).try(:title) %> 

Docs.

The actual problem is that your @profile doesn't seem to have an associated organization.

This can be solved in a number of ways; I would personally use a validation to make sure that your organization is being populated with each profile creation:

#app/models/profile.rb class Profile < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :organisation validates :organisation, presence: true end 

Of course, this won't resolve your current issue.

To solve that, you need to make sure your organisation_id foreign key is populated with the correct reference to the Organization model:

$ rails c $ profile = Profile.find [[your id]] $ profile.update organisation_id: [[org_id]] $ exit 

If you get it working, a cool trick you can use is delegate:

#app/models/profile.rb class Profile < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :organisation validates :organisation, presence: true delegate :title, to: :organisation, prefix: true #-> @profile.organisation_title end 

Delegate, as the name suggests, takes your request and sends it through to a dependent class. It works especially well with belongs_to because it removes the need to reference the associative object in between your parent and dependent classes.