attr_accessor, not able to access property

Question

This is probably very stupid question but here we go

class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base
 attr_accessor :group_id
end

From irb

Answer 1

Without the accessor, for sure you have a 'belongs_to :group' in your Foo model, so if you call 'group_id' to an instance of 'Foo' you will get the value of this field.

For instance, if you set an accessor called like that attribute( group_id) it will overwrite the original field and it will return nil, if haven´t assigned any value.

class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_accessor :group_id
end

# gets record which has group_id set to 106    
foo = Foo.find(1)
foo.group_id
=> nil
foo.group_id = "wadus"
=> "wadus"
foo.group_id
=> "wadus"