Question

In my Rails 3 project I have three models: Projects has_many Feeds, and Feeds has_many XML_Fields. I have an entry in the Projects table with :name = “TestProject”. I am running a script located in /app/ using rails runner, and I am trying to access the database entries with ActiveRecord:

class Testing < ActiveRecord::Base

project = Project.find_by_name("TestProject")
puts project
end

Whether I use find_by_name, find, where, or whatever, my results always end up looking like:

#<Project:0x00000102b30ad0>

How do I get ActiveRecord to return the actual contents of that db entry (e.g. I want it to put “TestProject”)?

Answer 1

Your output is perfectly fine. You are simply getting inspect output for your model. You have two options to get the desired output:

puts project.name

or redefine to_s:

def to_s
  name
end