Variable name convention

Rails
1

Hello All,

still a newbie in rails and would like to know when I shoud place a
‘@’ before a variable name and when not ?

Regards,

Joel

2

Hi Joel,

The @ symbol is (through my experience) generally used for sharing
variables between controllers and views. So in your controller, you’d
have something like:

@var = Users.find(…)

And in your view:

<%= "Hi, " + @var.first_name %>

But, again, that’s just how I use it :slight_smile:

3

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 4:10 PM, joel [email protected] wrote:

still a newbie in rails and would like to know when I shoud place a
‘@’ before a variable name and when not ?

It has nothing to do with convention.

@foo is an instance variable

foo is a local variable

http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/

In particular:
http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/html/tut_classes.html

–
Greg D.
http://destiney.com/

4

joel wrote:

Hello All,

still a newbie in rails and would like to know when I shoud place a
‘@’ before a variable name and when not ?

Regards,

Joel

See here:
http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/html/tut_classes.html

5

Ok Great !

Thanks Guys for these resources !

Joel

6

foo could also be a method!

Be wary of the fact that local variables take precedence over methods,
as shown in this example:

foo = “woot”
=> “woot”

def foo
“bar”
end
=> nil

foo
=> “woot”

7

To avoid that you can just write foo() i.e. with the parentheses, if
you want to call the function.

8

OK ! Nice information guys !

Thanks !

Joel

9

On 29 Jul 2008, at 01:55, Ryan B. wrote:

foo could also be a method!

Be wary of the fact that local variables take precedence over methods,
as shown in this example:

A common mistake related to this is

class Foo
attr_accessor :bar
def some_method
bar = true
end
end

This does not call the accessor, and does not set @bar (only the local
variable bar).

Fred