Question

In Rails, I have a model named Director which references a table with a field named also ‘director’.

When I do queries that use joins (either with the relationship in the model or using the .joins method) then try to print the director field, I get the relationship instead of the field, so when doing

<% @dvds.each do |dvd| %>
<%= "#{dvd.director}" %>

I get something like:

#<Director id: 93, director: "Brad Bird">

When I should get just “Brad Bird”.

Is there a way to disambiguate this and get only the field name without having to change my Model names?

Answer 1

You can do two things:

Use the field like:

<%= "#{dvd.director.director}" %>

Or add a to_s to the model like:

class Director

  def to_s
    self.director
  end

end

By the way, it’s a bit weird to have a director field on a Director model