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New update_attribute doesn't work with associations
Reported by Mateusz Drożdżyński | July 20th, 2010 @ 11:31 AM
Previous implementation of update_attribute:
def update_attribute(name, value)
send("#{name}=", value)
save(false)
end
worked just fine with associations.
The one present in current master breaks this support:
Consider this call:
article.update_attribute(:user, user)
Let's go through the method definition:
def update_attribute(name, value)
changes = record_update_timestamps || {}
if name
name = name.to_s
send("#{name}=", value) # this works fine, sets article.user to user
changes[name] = read_attribute(name) # this doesn't work; read_attribute returns nil for associations.
end
@changed_attributes.except!(*changes.keys)
primary_key = self.class.primary_key
self.class.update_all(changes, { primary_key => self[primary_key] }) == 1 # this doesn't work either; tries to update a column (user) which doesn't exist (should be updating user_id instead).
end
It either needs to be made clear that update_attribute does not work for associations (and preferably raise an exception if you try to do so, complaining that :user is not a database column in this example) or support it by detecting that you're passing an association and updating _id columns instead.
Comments and changes to this ticket
-
Neeraj Singh July 20th, 2010 @ 11:58 AM
- State changed from “new” to “resolved”
- Importance changed from “” to “Low”
My bad. I should have updated the doc after the refactoring.
Doc has been updated http://github.com/lifo/docrails/commit/767de13ff4a19a53d3fe99edb555...
Thanks for the feedback.
-
Mateusz Drożdżyński July 20th, 2010 @ 12:01 PM
What was the reason for not supporting associations? Is this a design decision or simply something that is yet to be added?
-
Mateusz Drożdżyński July 20th, 2010 @ 12:08 PM
Plus, regardless of the rationale behind it, shouldn't it raise an exception when you're trying to do so as opposed to going all the way through with the database query?
-
Neeraj Singh July 20th, 2010 @ 12:50 PM
update_attribute was meant for sure shot way of updating a column. For example after sending an email to a user you want to mark that email has been sent to user. You don't want any validation or before_save callback to abort the operation. In one case employer sent 3300 emails to same person because before_save operation returned false.
In 2-3 people used update_attribute to update association because update_attribute was using save and that operation was allowed. However that was not how update_attribute was supposed to be used. In rails3 scope of update_attribute has been limited.
Regarding raising the exception I did not think it was that big a deal because it will be caught during development time. I might be wrong on that.
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Jeremy Kemper
Mateusz Drożdżyński
Neeraj Singh