Question

I’m trying to always run some code after .find or .where or whatever is used to retrieve objects.

For example, the following describes what I want, but does not work

Class Person < ActiveRecord::BA
  @mortality=true
end

I want @mortality=true to run whenever a Person object is created
And based on my current understanding of ORM/ActiveRecord, a new object is created whenever retrieval is done. Hopefully that is correct.

Answer 1

You want to do this in the after_initialize method:

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  def after_initialize
    @mortality = true
  end
end

Note that this is something you should avoid doing if possible because it happens on every object, even when you retrieve enormous result sets.

In this (albeit simple) case, you can do the assignment lazily by overriding the getter:

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  def mortality
    @mortality.nil? ? true : @mortality
  end
end

(you can’t use the nil gate ||= here because it filters false values as well)