Question

I’m writing my first Rails app and I’m confused by a method call that I’ve seen in some of the documentation. In the snippet below, what does the call to project.active? do?

<%= form_for @person do |person_form| %>
  ...
  <% @person.projects.each do |project| %>
    <% if project.active? %>
      <%= person_form.fields_for :projects, project do |project_fields| %>
        Name: <%= project_fields.text_field :name %>
      <% end %>
    <% end %>
  <% end %>
  ...
<% end %>

I’ve tried looking for the source code of .active?, but I can’t find it… I searched through ActiveRecord::Base, which I assume is the superclass of project, but it’s not there. I don’t know where else to look.

Does anyone know what the .active? method does, and where I can find documentation on it?

Thanks,

D.

Answer 1

Most likely, in this case, your model Project has a boolean field on it named active. active? is a shortcut for booleans that ActiveRecord provides: it returns true or false based on the value of that boolean.

As a side note, the naked field name operates the same way — so project.active, just like project.active?, will return true or false. But most Ruby methods that return true or false end with a question mark, so boolean fields get an alias of their name plus a question mark for convenience.