Using attr_accessor and attr_accessible on the same field

Question

What happens in the background with the following code?

class User < ActiveRecord::Base

 attr_accessor :name
 attr_accessible :name

end

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Answer 1

Thanks everyone for quick answers! Your answers combined gave me the pieces I needed to understand this puzzle, I think.

(In a related problem, I was getting a lot of nil errors like "Object doesn’t support #inspect", and "undefined method ‘keys’ for nil:NilClass". I managed to solve it now, by removing the att_accessor field altogether.)

By experimenting with this particular case, this is what I've found out:

Actually, the :name field won't be persisted to the database.

user = User.new(:name=>"somename")

Will only set the attribute on the object, but not persist the :name column to the database. Like the following 'rails console' output shows:

> user
=> 
> user.save
=> true
> user
=> 

I assume this is because *the setter made by attr_accessor will override ActiveRecord's setter* (which takes care of the database persistence). You can still retrieve the value from the :name field from the object though, like this:

> user.name
=> "somename"

So, in conclusion, I've learnt that using attr_accessor on fields might lead to them not being persisted to the database. And while I thought attr_accessible describes fields in the database that should be accessible from the outside, it doesn't seem to make a difference in this case.