ActiveRecord Dangers Cheatsheet


Category: Code
Tags:  ActiveRecord    Ruby on Rails  

One of my least-favorite Rails experiences goes like this:

pry> user = User.find(id)

pry> user.bio = "a valid bio"

pry> user.save!
ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid: Validation failed: Name can't be blank

I pulled a record from the database, made a valid change, and was unable to save because the record I got from the database was invalid. This is especially frustrating when I make a larger change and scour hundreds of lines of intermedia code before I realize that User.find(id).save! would’ve failed just the same.

What’s happening here?

ActiveRecord has a number of useful methods that also skip your setters, validations, and callbacks. They’re fast and convenient, but make it easy to save invalid data or update existing data into an invalid state. Rather than being namespaced into a module or using a convention like “bang methods are unsafe”, most have names that are small variations on safe methods.

destroy  is safe, delete  is not. update  and update!  are both safe but update_column  and update_columns  are both unsafe. update_attributes  is safe, update_attribute  is not – wait, or do I have those the wrong way around?

There’s no structure, you’d have to memorize them, so I made a cheat sheet of the safe and unsafe methods on model classes and instances. Model class methods

Model instance methods

Here’s the PDF:

ActiveRecord 4.2.4 Dangers Cheatsheet

Most of the unsafe methods are useful for performance reasons, so I’m not saying to never use them. But I’d like to see them only used from a class or method that has “unsafe” in the name, put a big warning sign on them so that they don’t slip into normal use of your code.