Rails 3 - Uploading image as nested object via uploadify on new/create action

I have a project where I have several content types (Article, Interview, etc) with nested images. To handle the images, what I did was implement a popup 'image upload' box (using a combination of Paperclip and Uploadify) so the user can upload an image immediately to the article.

The process works like this: the user clicks the 'upload an image' icon, then a box pops up where they can add paperclip file upload fields to upload as many images as they want. Uploadify instantly uploads the photos and assigns them the article ID number they're attached to. Then the photo's HTML gets sent to the WYSIWYG editor. If they want to delete photos as well, they can. If it sounds like WordPress, that's what it's based on.

Anyway, I have this working great. Photos remain associated and attached with their respective articles, as opposed to throwing everything in one huge folder (like many WYSIWYG image uploaders do) where anyone can add/delete anything.

But there is one little flaw to this...as I said, the image is assigned the content's ID number when an upload is performed. Well, you can see how this is an issue when creating a brand new article, as a new article doesn't have an ID number before saving it. So the image upload fails. Thus, this whole process only works on the 'edit/update' action.

In the interim, I told the team to make sure to SAVE the article first, then when they go back to edit it they can then upload their images to the body. But naturally, they forget as it's an easy thing to do, and as this is very user-unfriendly, I gotta solve this.

I see two ways I can go about this.

1. Assign an ID (hidden field or otherwise) to an article on the 'new' form. This would appease the uploader as it fills the 'nil' value it errors out on, then when the article gets saved the first time, it would assign it that very same number. But I see a potential issue...what if anot开发者_StackOverflowher user creates an article at the same time and the database assigns it an identical ID number?

2. I noticed that the moment you create a new WordPress document, the new document 'autosaves' immediately as a draft. So my line of thinking is this...when the user goes to create a new document, the 'new' action would actually trigger a 'save' operation, bypass any validation errors (since the fields are blank), then immediately redirect to the 'edit' action. That way, the ID is saved and everything would work as normal, and the entire process may look seamless to the user.

How would you handle this situation? Like I suggested above, or is there an even better way?

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I decided to go the second route and perform a save on the new action and bypassing the validations, then redirecting to the edit form, throwing as "autosaved" flash message in for good measure. It works well.