Question

because I’m pretty new to Ruby on Rails I’ll explain what I did. I’ve got a virtual attribute in my model called testing. I’ve defined it like this:

class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
    attr_accessor :testing
    attr_accessible :user_name, :comment, :user, :testing

I then added custom method for custom validation like this:

validate :custom_validation

I also added the method, of course:

def custom_validation
   # a bit of custom_validation
end

I then added a field in my form:

<%= form_for(@comment) do |f| %>
    <%= render 'shared/error_messages', :object => f.object %>
    <%= f.hidden_field :post_id, :value => @post.id %>
    <% if !signed_in? %>
            <div class="field">
                    <%= f.label :user_name %>
                    <%= f.text_field :user_name, :class => "user_field" %>
            </div>
    <% else %>
            <%= f.hidden_field :user_id, :value => current_user.id %>
    <% end %>
            <div class="field">
                    <%= f.label :comment %>
                    <%= f.text_area :comment, :style => "height: 50px; width: 80%;" %>
            </div>
            <div class="field pin">
                    <%= f.label :testint %>
                    <%= f.text_field :testing, :class => "user_field" %>
            </div>
    <div class="buttons">
            <%= f.submit "Speichern" %>
    </div>
<% end %>

That’s all I did. So please don’t assume I did something else I didn’t describe here, because I didn’t 😉

My problem is, that my virtual field testing is always nil inside of my custom_validation method. Unless I run the validation in the console:

co = Comment.new
co.testing = "Hello"
co.valid?

I’ve checked using the logger. If I run via the console the testing-field isn’t nil. If I run it via the browser, it is. It seems that the parameter is somehow not passed to the model correctly. I hope I just missed something really obvious. Hope you can help me.

Cheers,
Michael

Answer 1

It has to do with what’s in your create or update actions. The scaffold generator will put in code to set real attributes, but does not call setter methods from attr_accessor.