Downcasing Legacy Table Column Names

Rails
1

I’m looking for the simplest way to automatically downcase the
attribute names of Models mapped to legacy tables that use upper
case. eg:

class Workorder < ActiveRecord::Base
set_table_name “WORKORDER”
end

which has “NAME” as an attribute can use “name” as an attribute.

currently:
workorder = Workorder.find(1)
workorder.NAME # => “workorder 1 name”

I want:
workorder.name # => “workorder 1 name”

Thanks,
Jamie

2

You can add a getter/setter for each attribute like:

class Workorder < ActiveRecord::Base
set_table_name “WORKORDER”

def name
self.NAME
end

def name=(theName)
self.NAME = theName
end

end

I’ve never used this myself so I may have the syntax wrong. However I
believe the concept is sound. Although it is not “automatic” as you
would like.

3

Yeah, but I didn’t want to hand code all those accessors–was looking
for an automatic way to deal with the problem.

Thanks,

Jamie

4

I ended up overriding method_missing in an abstract Model class.
Since ActiveRecord::Base’s method_missing is private, I ended up
copying the whole thing and putting the modified version in my
subclass. Basically, since I know the column names are upper case, I
just look to see if method_name.upcase is in the model’s attributes
hash and if so, upcase! the method_name and pass it along.

I’ve documented this here:
http://blog.dangdev.com/articles/2005/11/30/activerecord-model-legacy-
table-column-names

Looking forward to comments or a better way to do this. (What I would
really like is to convert the attributes to lower case as they are set.)

Jamie