Question

I’m creating a Ruby on Rails application, and I’m trying to create/login/logout users.

This is the schema for Users:

  create_table "users", :force => true do |t|
    t.string   "first_name"
    t.string   "last_name"
    t.text     "reputation"
    t.integer  "questions_asked"
    t.integer  "answers_given"
    t.string   "request"
    t.datetime "created_at"
    t.datetime "updated_at"
    t.string   "email_hash"
    t.string   "username"
    t.string   "hashed_password"
    t.string   "salt"
  end

The user’s personal information (username, first/last names, email) is populated through a POST. Other things such as questions_asked, reputation, etc. are set by the application, so should be initialized when we create new users. Right now, I’m just setting each of those manually in the create method for UsersController:

  def create
    @user = User.new(params[:user])
    @user.reputation = 0
    @user.questions_asked = 0
    @user.answers_given = 0
    @user.request = nil
    ...
  end

Is there a more elegant/efficient way of doing this?

Answer 1

params[:user] is just a hash, you could create a hash and merge it with the params like

def create
    params[:user].merge(
        { 
            :reputation => 0,
            :questions_asked => 0,
            :answers_given => 0
            ...
        }
    )

    @user = User.new(params[:user])
end

You could move this to your model if you wanted to remove that code from your controller, and just add an after_create filter..

but really if its just setting things to 0, set defaults in the database columns and you wont even have to handle it in your code..

  create_table "users", :force => true do |t|
    t.string   "first_name"
    t.string   "last_name"
    t.text     "reputation", :default => 0
    t.integer  "questions_asked", :default => 0
    t.integer  "answers_given", :default => 0
    t.string   "request"
    t.datetime "created_at"
    t.datetime "updated_at"
    t.string   "email_hash"
    t.string   "username"
    t.string   "hashed_password"
    t.string   "salt"
  end

If you cannot redo your migration, use change_column_default like

class SetDefaultsOnUsers < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
     change_column_default "users", "reputation", 0
  end

  def self.down
     change_column_default "users", "reputation", default
  end
end