@ vs self in models?

Rails
1

i’ve seen both of these syntaxes before and have also used both in my
own models:

class Foo
def get_bar
@bar
end
end

and

class Foo
def get_bar
self.bar
end
end

seemingly with no difference… i’m a nuby though so could anyone
enlighten me to the differences if there are any?

thanks,
jeff

2

@bar is an instance variable… self.bar would be a method. Try doing
this code in irb and you’ll see that calling get_bar in the first
version returns nil, while calling it on the second version throws a
NoMethodError.

b

3

aha! i guess then the reason it has worked in RoR models is due to AR
creating attr_accessors for the table columns, so calling
model.some_col was returning @some_col… thanks for clearing that up

4

Jeff Emminger wrote:

i’ve seen both of these syntaxes before and have also used both in my
own models:

class Foo
def get_bar
@bar
end
end

and

class Foo
def get_bar
self.bar
end
end

seemingly with no difference… i’m a nuby though so could anyone
enlighten me to the differences if there are any?

thanks,
jeff

This can be a real Gotcha in ActiveRecord. AR uses the missing
methods to give the illusion that it knows what columns you have in your
table. I believe that using the instance variable (@bar) now spews lots
of depreciation noeses onto stdout. Good programming practice it to
used the method call because you can then override that method call in
your class and massage the data before it goes out (or comes in). This
can eliminate the need for the get functions.

def bar
retval = self[:bar]
#do interesting thing with retval here
retval
end

John M.