Rails nicely lets me do this in a controller:
@user = User.new(params[:user])
and provides the attr_protected (and attr_accessible) model methods to hide attributes from this sort of the mass assignment.
Problem is, I quite often want to control which attributes are assigned on a per-action basis, which leaves me doing things like:
@user = User.new @user.name = params[:user][:name] @user.address = params[:user][:address]
Not very DRY. The alternative that I've been using recently is this:
@user = User.new(params[:user].only(:name, :address))
where the "only" method is defined as:
class Hash def only(*keys) keys.map!(&:to_s) Hash[*self.select {|key, value| keys.include?(key) }.flatten] end end
Do you think this is a nice way to do it? Got suggestions for alternatives or improvements?
Regards,
Pete Yandell
