Topic: STI

Making acts_as_ferret, STI, and DRb Work Together

Anthony Caliendo, Wednesday, September 10, 2008 @ 4:15 pm

If you are using ferret to index a base class which has subclasses using STI, you may have seen the following error once you start using the DRb server which ferret uses for production mode:
undefined method `[]' for #<DRb::DRbUnknown:0x2501bd4>

A quick google on this error will reveal a simple fix; however, this fix might not work for you (it didn't for me). My problem was a result of using the :models option when invoking #find_ids_with_ferret. Fortunately, there is a relatively simple workaround to make ferret play nicely in this scenario.

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Software Development

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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