Question

This is my 2nd day playing with Ruby on Rails, so please be gentle 🙂

I have a very (hopefully) simple question: I want to set a publish date on my model, when it is indeed being created. I am using Mongoid, and it looks like this:

class Page
  include Mongoid::Document

  field :content, type: String
  field :title, type: String
  field :published_on, type: DateTime
end

Here is the question: should I set the published_on field from the create action, just before the call to @page.save? Or is there a better, more idiomatic way?

If I do it like that, meaning, calling @page.published_on = Date.now from within the controller’s action, I get a warning:

Cannot find ‘published_on=’ for type ‘Page’

Answer 1

If you put

class Page
  include Mongoid::Document
  include Mongoid::Timestamps

you get the rails automagic fields created_at and updated_at