#16 Virtual Attributes (revised)

The validation part is what I looked for a long time, Ryan, thanks very much.

Very nice! How about revising episode #8 "Layouts and Content For" episode?

I have to do the price_in_cents stuff all the time, so I made priceable. Nothing too special, but still handy

I realise that you probably want to keep your examples simple and all in one file, but isn't creating categories or tags within the product model considered 'bad form'?

I'd love to see an episode with your take on the current OOP 'movement' in the Rails community - maybe a discussion on how and when you should use POROs etc.

You did some good episodes on design patterns like presenters etc. but a more general look at OOP would be great. Maybe even a multi-part series where you refactor a more complicated real world app?

Keep up the good work.

Tip: to check if a value is set on a field, Rails provides you with methods that end with a question mark. So your price_in_dollars method will look like this:

  def price_in_dollars
    price_in_cents.to_d/100 if price_in_cents?
  end

It's a small but neat change.

Also, speaking of prices, there is an excellent gem called money-rails for handling that: https://github.com/RubyMoney/money-rails

I would have liked to see how you handle concatenating multiple fields for the date/time/zone... rails date and time tag helpers are quite clumsy for users to operate. I tend to use text fields for both date and time and a select for time zone, with javascript popups for input selection. I hate the code in my model that puts this all together into a single database datetime column. Do you have a preferred method of handling this type of situation?

First of all: Great episode as always!

But I've got a question:
I tried to use the example from this episode with the creation of a new category in my app. I use internationalization there. Has anybody an idea how I could add the correct label to my text_field, without duplication inside my locales?

Does creating a new category belong in the model? - It seems a bit weird to have it in the model rather than the controller, or is it just me?

I have many price fields (monthly, average, total etc).

Can these getter/setter methods be rewritten for use with all my fields?

Wouldn't it be a good move to make the validation method private?

Virtual attributes don't activate callback functions in Rails 3.2.8

What am I missing? I cannot have a hour and min field convert to a duration model field.

  attr_accessible :date, :hour_dur, :min_dur
  attr_accessor :hour_dur, :min_dur
  has_many :shifts
  has_many :seats
  belongs_to :user
  
  before_save :update_duration

  validates_presence_of :date
  validates_presence_of :duration

  def update_duration
    duration = hour_dur*60 + min_dur
  end
  
  def hour_dur
    duration / 60 if duration.present?
  end
  
  def min_dur
    duration % 60 if duration.present?
  end
end

Great Stpes