Question

How could I perform some modification on all data asked of a model before it returns it? The callbacks in rails appear to only deal with creation or updating of data, not retreival.

I bet this is probably a very obvious solution I’m not seeing.

Here’s an example:

I have a table called quotes. Before any data is given by the Quote model, I’d like to replace all occurances of the word Sun Tzu with Chinese Dude.

Answer 1

Think of this a different way.

You want to change quote.text, so it returns the database value of text with the substitution applied.

Here’s the code

def text
  if self[:text]
    self[:text].gsub(/Sun Tzu/, "Chinese Dude")
  end
end

Thereby you only overwrite what you need.