What is the right way to override a setter method in Ruby on Rails?

Question

I am using Ruby on Rails 3.2.2 and I would like to know if the following is a \"proper\"/\"correct\"/\"sure\" way to override a setter method for a my class attribute.

Answer 1

I have found that (at least for ActiveRecord relationship collections) the following pattern works:

has_many :specialties

def specialty_ids=(values)
  super values.uniq.first(3)
end

(This grabs the first 3 non-duplicate entries in the array passed.)