Question

In Rails 3.2 I’m trying to set a default OdontologicUnity instace when a User is created.

User:

require "odontological_unity"
class User < ActiveRecord::Base

    attr_accessible :odontologic_unity, ...
    ...

    belongs_to :odontologic_unity

    after_create :associate_default_unity

    private 
    def associate_default_unity
      ou = OdontologicUnity::DEFAULT
      ou.save!
      self.update_attribute :odontologic_unity, ou
    end

end

OdontologicUnity:

# encoding: UTF-8
class OdontologicUnity < ActiveRecord::Base
  ...

  DEFAULT = OdontologicUnity.new(
    name: 'Actualiza el nombre',
    address: 'Actualiza la dirección',
    nit: 'Actualiza el NIT',
    mission: "Actualiza la misión",
    vision: "Actualiza la visión"
  )
end

The code works without raising exceptions but when I see to my DB I got this (odontological_unity_id: nil):

User Load (0.4ms) SELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE "users"."id" = $1 LIMIT 1 [["id", 9]]
=> #<User id: 9, email: "[e-mail]", password_digest: "$2a$10$BPDmM6stW0sO6tQbwwJCxuWO4hvWIAeSzogEl2GGiqmo...", remember_token: "ltU5RBcifDsr9uPIci9z_A", names: "Example User", lastnames: "Some Lastnames", identity_document_number: "1515", odontological_unity_id: nil, created_at: "2012-06-24 15:00:17", updated_at: "2012-06-24 15:02:05">

The weird thing about it is the OdontologicUnity record is actually created, but doesn’t get associated with the user.

Answer 1

I would recommend you use a method for creating a default user, not a constant. Regarding your problem, try a before create instead and assign the id:

before_create :associate_default_unity

def associate_default_unity
  ou = OdontologicUnity::DEFAULT
  ou.save!
  self.write_attribute :odontologic_unity_id, ou.id
end