Undefined Method Error in View

After messing around with PHP for over a year, I took one look at Ruby
on Rails and fell in love. But it’s one of those confused “Men are from
Mars, Women are from Venus” type things…

I’ve written a method which does find_by_sql to pick a random row from a
database. When I call that method I get an “undefined method ‘text’ for
…” ‘text’ is the name of one of two columns in the database, and
something I want to display.

I know the SQL works it was lifted from a PHP project, and from a
command line returns exactly what it should.

What confuses me is what I’m doing in the view. If my view looks like
this:

<% for column in Quote.content_columns %>

<%= column.human_name %> <%= column.send(column.name) %>

<% end %>

I get the method error.

However, if my view looks like this:

<% for column in Quote.content_columns %>

<%= column.human_name %>

<% end %>

It works, printing out the column names. To me that verifies that the
sql is right, but I’m missing something when it comes to displaying the
actual contents in the column ‘text’.

From what I’ve been reading, ActiveRecord should automatically create
the method ‘text’ in order to display the column data. It’s working
well enough to output the column name, but what I’m a doing wrong when
it comes to displaying the data?

Thanks!
Bill

On Feb 27, 2006, at 9:40 AM, Bill Wilcox wrote:

I’ve written a method which does find_by_sql to pick a random row
from a
database. When I call that method I get an “undefined method
‘text’ for
…” ‘text’ is the name of one of two columns in the database, and
something I want to display.

Someone stated earlier how smart people solve their own problems. If
that’s the case why do I feel like an idiot? Well, today I learned
more about how Active Record functions and more importantly, how to
use the built in syntax (instead of my old sql querries) to do what I
want.

http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/HowtoSelectRandomRecords

Okay, next bit of database interactivity I promise to do the rails
way first…

Bill