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Importance_2
v3.0.9 - Show latest stable - 3 notes - Class: ActiveRecord::Base
[](attr_name) public

Returns the value of the attribute identified by attr_name after it has been typecast (for example, “2004-12-12” in a data column is cast to a date object, like Date.new(2004, 12, 12)). (Alias for the protected read_attribute method).

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February 27, 2009 - (v1.2.6 - v2.2.1)
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read_attribute?

The source if this method and other methods indicate the reading of read_attribute (protected)

there is no documentation about the insides of this method, the only entry listed is read_attribute (private) which is deprecated since 1.2.6?

January 1, 2011
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Missing method definitions

THAiSi, and any others wondering this as well:

I’ve done some pretty extensive digging in to the rails code, for a couple of projects, and I’ve found that there are several methods that don’t appear in APIDock. There are several reasons for this, but I’m not sure read_attribute falls under any of them. Perhaps it has something to do with read_attribute being defined and/or redefined in the foundation for rails (they actually do some stuff to mask out a ton of default behavior of ruby for these classes, and add their own level of inheritance functionality. Things like cattr_accessor - which is like attr_accessor, but for a class, rather than an object…

class Object < ActiveRecord::Base
  cattr_accessor some_attr
end

would allow for reading and writing a value on the class, itself. i.e.

Object.some_attr = 5

In addition, several methods, regarding validations, callbacks, etc. are actually defined dynamically, based on things like the model name, using class_eval. These are not grabbed *at all* by APIdock, and this is where I spent most of my effort in reverse engineering how rails behaves.

Hope that helps.

January 1, 2011
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read_attribute/write_attribute

I went back and looked at my notes from my previous project.

Yep, these methods were removed from ActiveRecord::Base in an early version, and moved into a Module called AttributeMethods, which is then included in ActiveRecord::Base.

So the methods are available in ActiveRecord::Base… but they are defined elsewhere.

APIdock could benefit from some better linkage, and possibly a better parser to get some of the more dynamically defined methods.