Question

What is the proper way to update a record in Ruby on Rails? Just a single record. For example, I want to modify the name of the title somehow. A code snippet would be awesome!

Answer 1

The basic way to update a record is like that :

@user.name = "new name"
@user.save

this assumes that @user in an instance of a User class having a name field.

you can also do mass_assignment with the update_attributes method

@user.update_attributes name: "new name", email: "[e-mail]"

If you want an exception to be raised if the record is invalid you can use the bang method instead, so here it would be save! & update_attributes!

You can also use the update_attribute which has been (or will be soon) renamed to update_column to update a single column while skipping the validation, but you should generally avoid using this method

more doc there

Finally you can use the write_attribute method