Topic Archive: activerecord

Mass Assigning Inheritance Column Values for ActiveRecord STI with Rails

Anthony Caliendo, Wednesday, August 13, 2008 @ 3:06 pm

One of the security features in Rails is to prevent mass assigning values for certain columns (when passing a hash to #new, #attributes=, and #update_attributes).  This is to ensure that a malicious user can't exploit the system by passing in values for certain attributes you really don't want them to change.

In Rails 2.1, one of the attributes that will always be protected from mass assignment is the inheritance_column.  In most cases, protecting inheritance_column; is desired because we don't want (for example) someone to change their user type by specifying type = 'Admin' when posting a form.  Despite this, there are some cases where we do want to allow the user to specify the type.

However, even if we specify #attr_accessible on the inheritance_column, we will not be able to mass assign a value to it.  Rails will not allow it unless we put in a little hack to work around this feature.

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How to use will_paginate with non-ActiveRecord collection/array

Sharad Jain, Friday, June 6, 2008 @ 4:04 pm

will_paginate is very well designed plugin. Besides ActiveRecord object integration, it can integrate with array and any collection that you may have. The README.rdoc (in version 2.2.2) and wiki clearly and concisely document how to use it with ActiveRecord objects. I recently needed to use it for a collection outside of activerecord and here is how I did it.
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