Question

I have a model User and when I create one, I want to pragmatically setup some API keys and what not, specifically:
@user.apikey = Digest::MD5.hexdigest(BCrypt::Password.create("jibberish").to_s)

I want to be able to run User.create!(:email=>"[e-mail]") and have it create a user with a randomly generated API key, and secret.

I currently am doing this in the controller, but when I tried to add a default user to the seeds.rb file, I am getting an SQL error (saying my apikey is null).

I tried overriding the save definition, but that seemed to cause problems when I updated the model, because it would override the values. I tried overriding the initialize definition, but that is returning a nil:NilClass and breaking things.

Is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

use callbacks and ||= ( = unless object is not nil ) 🙂

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  before_create :add_apikey #or before_save

  private
  def add_apikey
    self.apikey ||= Digest::MD5.hexdigest(BCrypt::Password.create(self.password).to_s)
  end
end

but you should definitely take a look at devise, authlogic or clearance gems