Rails 5: unable to retrieve hash values from parameter

Since Rails 5, params are of class 'ActionController::Parameters'

If you do params.to_h you will get the following error.

*** ActionController::UnfilteredParameters Exception: unable to convert 
unpermitted parameters to hash

You can do as follows to permit all the params and get as Hash format:

parameters = params.permit(params.keys).to_h

"But beware of using this! You are permitting all the params which may include unknown params that can harm your code."

take a look to this. Very weird since ActionController::Parameters is a subclass of Hash, you can convert it directly to a hash using the to_h method on the params hash.

However to_h only will work with whitelisted params, so you can do something like:

permitted = params.require(:line_item).permit(: line_item_attributes_attributes)
attributes = permitted.to_h || {}
attributes.values

But if instead you do not want to whitelist then you just need to use the to_unsafe_h method.

Update

I was very curious about this issue, so I started researching, and now that you clarified that you are using Rails 5, well that's the cause of this issue, as @tillmo said in stable releases of Rails like 4.x, ActionController::Parameters is a subclass of Hash, so it should indeed respond to the values method, however in Rails 5 ActionController::Parameters now returns an Object instead of a Hash

Note: this doesn’t affect accessing the keys in the params hash like params[:id]. You can view the Pull Request that implemented this change.

To access the parameters in the object you can add to_h to the parameters:

params.to_h

If we look at the to_h method in ActionController::Parameters we can see it checks if the parameters are permitted before converting them to a hash.

# actionpack/lib/action_controller/metal/strong_parameters.rb
def to_h
  if permitted?
    @parameters.to_h
  else
    slice(*self.class.always_permitted_parameters).permit!.to_h
  end
end

for example:

def do_something_with_params
  params.slice(:param_1, :param_2)
end

Which would return:

{ :param_1 => "a", :param_2 => "2" }

But now that will return an ActionController::Parameters object.

Calling to_h on this would return an empty hash because param_1 and param_2 aren’t permitted.

To get access to the params from ActionController::Parameters, you need to first permit the params and then call to_h on the object

def do_something_with_params
  params.permit([:param_1, :param_2]).to_h
end

The above would return a hash with the params you just permitted, but if you do not want to permit the params and want to skip that step there is another way using to_unsafe_hash method:

def do_something_with_params
  params.to_unsafe_h.slice(:param_1, :param_2)
end

There is a way of always permit the params from a configuration from application.rb, if you want to always allow certain parameters you can set a configuration option. Note: this will return the hash with string keys, not symbol keys.

#controller and action are parameters that are always permitter by default, but you need to add it in this config.
config.always_permitted_parameters = %w( controller action param_1 param_2)

Now you can access the params like:

def do_something_with_params
  params.slice("param_1", "param_2").to_h
end

Note that now the keys are strings and not symbols.

Hope this helps you to understand the root of your issue.

Source: eileen.codes

I think what's happening is the following:

In a console you are working with a simple hash called attributes. As a hash the attributes parameter in the console has a valid instance method called values.

In your rails app the params hash is not a simple hash any more. It is an instance of the ActionController::Parameters class. As an instance of that class it does not have an instance method called values, but it does have an instance method called to_h & to_unsafe_h, which would accomplish your goals. After calling to_h on your parameters you can call the values method.