Can't mass-assign these protected attributes?

Rails
1

I’ve run hundreds of migrations in my happy days with Rails but find
an incredible anomoly here that I can’t build a simple record in
migrations. I’m getting the error:
Can’t mass-assign these protected attributes: field1, field2, etc.
I found a few Googles about people recently having this problem
running a FasterCSV import, but that’s it.
Any ideas are greatly appreciated.
Kathleen

2

On May 30, 10:06 pm, “[email protected]” [email protected]
wrote:

I’ve run hundreds of migrations in my happy days with Rails but find
an incredible anomoly here that I can’t build a simple record in
migrations. I’m getting the error:
Have you been using attr_protected or attr_accessible in your models?
They prevent update_attributes, new, create etc… from assigning to
the relevant fields.

Fred

3

Mr. Cheung,
Thank you so much for your reply and hopefully this will help others
using ‘restful_authentication’. This line is automatically inserted
into the USER model;

attr_accessible :login, :email, :password, :password_confirmation

If anyone is trying to embellish their user model with the ability for
the user to EDIT or run a migration to load records, they will receive
this message.

Can’t mass-assign these protected attributes: field1, field2, etc

Would you just remove this line altogether?
Thank you,
Kathleen

On May 30, 4:09 pm, Frederick C. [email protected]

4

On Sat, 31 May 2008 05:56:38 -0700 (PDT)
“[email protected]” [email protected] wrote:

this message.

Can’t mass-assign these protected attributes: field1, field2, etc

Would you just remove this line altogether?
Thank you,
Kathleen

The attr_accessible is there for a reason, to protect the application
from malicious inputs.

You might want to watch:

Before you remove it all together. To summarize: Without
attr_accessible there, a knowledgeable user can give themselves
ownership of user resources or admin privileges.

You might want to instead add the appropriate properties to the
attr_accessible.

Regards,
Jon

5

[email protected] wrote:

I’ve run hundreds of migrations in my happy days with Rails but find
an incredible anomoly here that I can’t build a simple record in
migrations.
[…]

Generally, you should not be building records in your migrations. What
are you trying to do here?

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

6

I have found a solution to this problem!!! (solution is geared for the
newest version of rails etc, as of mid May 2012)

If you are simply doing early stage development stuff, you do not need
the extra feature which blocks mass assignment. The thing is, github was
hacked by some dude (whitehat or black I’m not sure) but anyway, the
hacker basically did it by changing the code a little bit in order to
pass some values (boolean values indicating he was an admin or
something) that weren’t meant to be passed.

ANYWAY, Here’s how I fixed mine (bear in mind this is a security hole
but you can deal with it later, to be honest. Nobody wants to hack me
that’s for damned sure, at least not yet)------ - Go to
/config/application.rb - Scroll down towards the end where you’ll find
{config.active_record.whitelist_attributes = true) - Set it to false
(this is like turning off a firewall I guess)

That’s it! This is the simple solution for early coding. You’ll have to
deal with this later as it is a pretty glaring security hole. But for
now, just shut the damn thing off. Ruby is great and all, but coding is
hard enough as it is. Good luck!

Oh yeah, in order to activate the changes (just to make sure
essentially), I did a {rake db:migrate VERSION=0} to reset everything.
Then a simple {rake db:migrate} to set make sure the new changes were in
place. I’m not sure if this is entirely necessary but it won’t do any
harm as long as your migration files are in good shape.

partial credit goes to railscasts.com for this one, but not entirely. I
didn’t expect this to work.

7

Am also getting the same error. The application was working fine till
yesterday night! All the models have become protected. I have been using
authlogic for a long time now. It never caused me a problem. Can
paperclip / oauth cause it?

8

On 17 May 2012 22:56, David D. [email protected] wrote:

ANYWAY, Here’s how I fixed mine (bear in mind this is a security hole

Another solution is just to use attr_accessable to specify the methods
that
should be publicly accessible, and then you don’t end up with a security
hole. Magic. I don’t think that’s a particularly hard thing to do and it
shouldn’t slow you down.