Rails console outputs dirty/outdated data

Question

I'm following Michael's Ruby on Rails tutorial (Chapter 6.2.2) and when I go to the rails console --sandbox to attempt to create Users the outputs come totally outdated.

I update a user's attribute, I return the user and the console outputs nil for all attributes. However if I output the user.attribute the data is there.

The first save fails because a user must have a name, though I had this problem even before addind validations.

What am I missing here? I followed all the instructions and I'm doing pretty basic stuff. I'm executing the following commands:

$ rails console --sandbox
Loading development environment in sandbox (Rails 4.0.2)
Any modifications you make will be rolled back on exit

2.1.0 :001 > user = User.new(name: "", email: "mhartl@example.com")
 => #<User id: nil, name: nil, email: nil, citizen_number: nil, created_at: nil, updated_at: nil> 
2.1.0 :002 > user.save
   (0.1ms)  SAVEPOINT active_record_1
   (0.2ms)  ROLLBACK TO SAVEPOINT active_record_1
 => false 
2.1.0 :003 > user.valid?
 => false 
2.1.0 :004 > user.name = "Bob"
 => "Bob" 
2.1.0 :005 > user.valid?
 => true 
2.1.0 :006 > user
 => #<User id: nil, name: nil, email: nil, citizen_number: nil, created_at: nil, updated_at: nil> 
2.1.0 :007 > user.save
   (0.2ms)  SAVEPOINT active_record_1
  SQL (6.2ms)  INSERT INTO "users" ("created_at", "updated_at") VALUES (?, ?)  [["created_at", Sat, 08 Feb 2014 19:15:37 UTC +00:00], ["updated_at", Sat, 08 Feb 2014 19:15:37 UTC +00:00]]
   (0.1ms)  RELEASE SAVEPOINT active_record_1
 => true 
2.1.0 :008 > user
 => #<User id: 1, name: nil, email: nil, citizen_number: nil, created_at: "2014-02-08 19:15:37", updated_at: "2014-02-08 19:15:37">

---

My user model:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base

  attr_accessor :name, :email, :citizen_number

  VALID_EMAIL_REGEX = /\A[\w+\-.]+@[a-z\d\-.]+\.[a-z]+\z/i
  VALID_CITIZEN_NUMBER_REGEX = /[1-9]\d{7,}/
  validates :name, presence: true, length: { maximum: 50 }
  validates :email, presence: true, format: { with: VALID_EMAIL_REGEX }, uniqueness: { case_sensitive: false }
  validates :citizen_number, presence: true, format: { with: VALID_CITIZEN_NUMBER_REGEX }, uniqueness: true

  before_save { lowercase_email() }

  def lowercase_email() 
    self.email = email.downcase
  end

end

Answer 1

DiAlex, do you have the code that produced this? I'd like to try it. Since the issue is actually something that happens before the save but after "initialization", I can't see how reload or the validations matter.

Update: Based on the tests and back and forth with you, I think your problem is related with the misuse of attr_accessor and attr_accessible.

Try removing :citizen_number from the attr_accessor. I tried that and your code started working (passing all your tests) and the console started outputting the correct values too.

Answer 2

Use reload

user.reload should give your up to date user with the correct attributes, as explained in the Documentation, it reloads the attributes of this object from the database, so you can now get the object attributes as expected, if they saved correctly

Answer 3

Diogo, something is preventing your user.save. After the first attempt of user.save, try user.errors. This will give you a hash with the errors that prevented your model to save.

Most probably you will find an error in your DB Scheme, as the user.valid? returns true.

Answer 4

Have you tried without sandbox mode? Perhaps it is somehow restricting the write.

rails console