Question

I’m stuck in a Ruby on Rails tutorial at this point. I went through the has_secure_password class definition and I cant figure out in which part of the application is the password= method being called? I didn’t call it explicitly anywhere in our tutorial but the when I enter:

User.create{blah blah} 

into the Rails console it automatically encrypts the password and adds it to the password_digest column!

I’ve been unable to Google this because of the = sign in the method name, so please help me out here.

Answer 1

Your relevant line is:

@user = User.new(name: "Example User", email: "[e-mail]", 
             password: "foobar", password_confirmation: "foobar")

When ActiveRecord model classes receives new or create with an options hash, they transform the hash keys into method names and call #{method_name}= on the newly generated model.

This allows for the controller pattern (or anti-pattern depending on your view)

User.new(params)