Question

I am using Rails 2.3.2 and I am really miss something important in here.

I got some .rb files in my lib folder and in one of them, I got a line saying

User.new(x,y,z)

But when I go to the user.rb which is also sitting in lib folder, I don’t find any method with defined with new. When I look at the initializer, it just assigns the incoming attributes to the variables like

def initialize(x,y,z)
  @x = x
  @y = y
  @z = z
end

Can you guys please tell me what I am really missing here. I know I am missing something really important.

Thanks

Answer 1

In Ruby (not only Rails) calling ClassName.new() invokes initialize method from this class to … well.. initialize the object created. The initialize method will be passed all the arguments that are passed to new()

See here for details: http://ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/html/tut_classes.html