Question

I’m a newbie to Rails, and I was thinking in a good solution to set protected attributes in my models before saving them, but I can’t find out a proper way of doing it.

Lets say I have Users, who belong to Companies, and these companies can have many Clients. Before saving a new Client, I want to set its company_id, getting it from the current_user’s company_id that is stored in the session (I’m using Devise).

I was thinking about using a model callback, as before_create or whatever, but I then I realized that my Rspec model tests may fail, because there will be no current_user while running them…

Is there a best practice of setting this parameters that have to be set automatically?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Simply set it in the controller.

def create
  @new_user = User.new(params[:user])
  @new_user.company = current_user.company # <-- here
  if @new_user.save
    # ...
  else
    # ...
  end
end

If you set it in the model callbacks, there are some disadvantages.

• It breaks your tests
• It may not be needed everywhere – imagine you create an admin frontend.