Question

I just had a general question about Ruby on Rails and the attr_accessible attributes that go in the models (Rails 3). Can someone explain which model attributes are supposed to be defined there? I remember something about risk for mass assignment, though I’m not too knowledgeable in this aspect… Thanks 🙂

Answer 1

attr_accessible allows you to define a whitelist of attributes on the model that can be mass assigned. So if you have 10 attrs but only whitelist 3 of them, only those three can be mass assigned.

class Foo < ActiveRecord:Base
  #lets say you have attrs one, two, three
  attr_accessible :one, :two
end

#You can do this:
Foo.new({:one => 1, :two => 2})

#if you were to do this:
Foo.new({:one => 1, :two => 2, :three => 3})
#Foo's three attr would not be set