find_or_create by params (extension to dynamic attribute based finders)

vosechu@create-on.com (Chuck Vose) — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 22:40:00 -0400

Rails has a dynamic method where you can do find_or_create_by_attr_name(attr) but it the method names get incredibly long very quickly. So SJS wrote this article in which he tries to remedy the situation. His solution was pretty elegant but it still only worked for fields that were already defined in the database; if you often redefine setter methods it doesn’t work at all.

Here’s my attempt to remedy the situation.

module ActiveRecordExtensions
  def self.included(base)
    base.extend(ClassMethods)
  end

  module ClassMethods
    def find_or_create(params)
      begin
        return self.find(params[:id])
      rescue ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound => e
        attrs = {}

        # search for valid attributes in params
        self.column_names.map(&:to_sym).each do |attrib|
          # skip unknown columns, and the id field
          next if params[attrib].nil? || attrib == :id

          attrs[attrib] = params[attrib]
        end

        # call the appropriate ActiveRecord finder method
        found = self.send("find_by_#{attrs.keys.join('_and_')}", *attrs.values) if !attrs.empty?

        if found && !found.nil?
          return found
        else
          return self.create(params)
        end
      end
    end
    alias create_or_find find_or_create
  end
end

ActiveRecord::Base.send(:include, ActiveRecordExtensions)

Newb instructions

Create a file called active_record_extensions.rb in your the lib directory. Then add `require ‘active_record_extensions’` to your environment.rb at the bottom (without the ``). Restart your server and see what happens!

The Vose Way: Tag find_or_create

find_or_create by params (extension to dynamic attribute based finders)

Newb instructions