How to initialize an ActiveRecord with values in Rails?

Question

In plain java I\'d use:

public User(String name, String email) {
  this.name = name;
  this.email = f(email);
  this.admin = false;
}

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Answer 1

I was searching for something similar this morning. While setting a default value in the database will obviously work, it seems to break with Rails' convention of having data integrity (and therefore default values?) handled by the application.

I stumbled across this post. As you might not want to save the record to the database immediately, I think the best way is to overwrite the initialize method with a call to write_attribute().

def initialize
  super
  write_attribute(name, "John Doe")
  write_attribute(email,  f(email))
  write_attribute(admin, false)
end