Question

Right now I have a Rails 3 model for storing profile data. One of the columns in that database table contains an image url if the user chooses to display a profile picture (this also integrates with the Facebook Graph API to store the user’s profile picture url if they login with Facebook but that’s irrelevant). The problem I am having is that when the image column is nil, I need a way to set it to a default path on my server. Please note that I cannot use a default value in a migration or model here. My thought was to use an after_find but the following is not working:

In Profile Model:

  def after_find
    if self.image.nil?
      self.image = "/assets/generic_profile_image.png"
    end
  end

In view (HAML):

.profile_pic
    = image_tag @user.profile.image

The Profile model is linked to a User model via a has_one association. Right now instead of dynamically turning the image attribute into “/assets/generic_profile_image.png”, it seems to do nothing leaving me with the following generated code on my page:

    <div class='profile_pic'>
      <img alt="Assets" src="/assets/" />
    </div>

Any suggestions on how to fix this issue would be greatly appreciated!

P.S. A conditional in the view is out of the question as the profile image is shown in way too many places!

Answer 1

My guess is your after_find callback ins’t actually getting called. You need to define it this way:

class Profile < ActiveRecord::Base
  after_find :update_image

  def update_image
    if self.image.nil?
      self.image = "/assets/generic_profile_image.png"
    end
  end
end

Now everything should work fine.