Reuse of attribute

Kind of confused about why this happened.

Initially, my “players” table had a column named “password”. While
learning about hashing, I had a model similar to the above, except the
before_create looked like this:

self.password = Player.hashed_password(self.password)

When I saved a player, I always got null in the password in the
database.

But, if I set the hashed_password into some other attribute
(self.last_name, let’s say), I ended up with a hash value in the
last_name column.

So all I did was to drop and create the table with the column called
“hashed_password” instead, and updated the model as attached, and off I
went.

I don’t understand why the ‘password’ column kept getting nulled
initially, though. I expected it would act like java; a reference to
the password attribute (string) would be passed into the hashed_password
method, which would return a reference to a new string, which I would
happen to assign to the hashed_password attribute.

Can anyone shed a little light on what’s under the covers? Just a
curiousity question, it’s all good after the rename.

On Nov 29, 3:47 am, Scott P. [email protected]
wrote:

the password attribute (string) would be passed into the hashed_password
method, which would return a reference to a new string, which I would
happen to assign to the hashed_password attribute.

Can anyone shed a little light on what’s under the covers? Just a
curiousity question, it’s all good after the rename.

Attachments:http://www.ruby-forum.com/attachment/2981/player.rb


Posted viahttp://www.ruby-forum.com/.

I’m guessing that you may have overwritten the default AR accessor for
‘password’ with your call to:

attr_accessor :password

Hence, the ‘password’ field not being saved to the db.

A better approach, IMHO, is naming your password field differently
(like password_hash) and saving it with a the below password method:

def password=(password)
self.password_hash = Digest::SHA1.hexdigest(password)
end

That way, you can set a new password for the given player even after
it has already been created.

Erol F. wrote:

On Nov 29, 3:47?am, Scott P. [email protected]
wrote:

the password attribute (string) would be passed into the hashed_password
method, which would return a reference to a new string, which I would
happen to assign to the hashed_password attribute.

Can anyone shed a little light on what’s under the covers? ?Just a
curiousity question, it’s all good after the rename.

Attachments:http://www.ruby-forum.com/attachment/2981/player.rb


Posted viahttp://www.ruby-forum.com/.

I’m guessing that you may have overwritten the default AR accessor for
‘password’ with your call to:

attr_accessor :password

Hence, the ‘password’ field not being saved to the db.

A better approach, IMHO, is naming your password field differently
(like password_hash) and saving it with a the below password method:

def password=(password)
self.password_hash = Digest::SHA1.hexdigest(password)
end

That way, you can set a new password for the given player even after
it has already been created.

Yep, absolutely right–exactly what I did is re-name the db column as
you show, and off I went.

I was thinking of them like members of a java class, I’ll have to read
up on the attr_accessor and how these objects actually act.

Thank you for the response.