Add custom column to User Model using rails Clearance gem

Question

I use the Clearance gem to add authentification to my website. The standard User model looks like this:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  include Clearance::User
end

Now i want to add more properties to the User Model. I created this migration:

class AddCustomernameToUsers < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    add_column :users, :customername, :string
  end
end

After rake db:migrate, the database now has one more column for :customername

as next step I edited the User Model file so it looks like this:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  include Clearance::User
  attr_accessor :customername
end

As the next step, I signed up a new user and used sqlite database browser to add the test string 'charly' in the customer name field for this user.

In my controller, i now want to create a user object and print it out to see if all the data is present.

thisUser = User.find(current_user.id)
puts thisUser.inspect

the console output is:

#<User id: 1, email: "test@test.de", encrypted_password: "0494a9b3b692acaea96ab57bed500adf26dbafa5", salt: "75c889d099438476204ce46b9cb406fb1f73423c", confirmation_token: nil, remember_token: "907b9bd600246d0b8dcc06a782457665f614b368", created_at: "2012-03-21 20:59:44", updated_at: "2012-03-21 21:12:59", customername: nil>

so customername is nil. somehow the data for this field is not pulled out of the database correctly.

what am i doing wrong?

Sorry, I'm a rails beginner. Might be a very simple thing to do, but I tried hard and googled all day and couldn't get it to work, so I turn to the wisdom of stack overflow. Thanks guys.

Answer 1

Instead of using attr_accessor in User model, use attr_accesible :customername and it will work. Because without attr_accessible, data will not be saved in your database and that is the reason you are getting nil value for the field.

Answer 2

Are you sure you are editing the correct database when using the sqlite database browser? If so I would try modifying your user creation code to include the customer name rather than adding it using a separate tool and seeing if that helps.