find_or_create : how to know the resulting operation ?

rubyonrails-talk
1

hello,

find_or_create_by has a different behaviour according to the existence of the instance in the database,

is it possible to know the resulting operation (find or create) which has been actually executed ?

thank you,

Fabrice

2

With find_or_create, I don’t believe there is a way.

You can certainly do it with find_or_initialize

winter = Tag.find_or_initialize_by_name("Winter")
winter.persisted? # true if record exists, false if it does not
3

Just a thought. Maybe you can use a call back before the record is saved to set up a virtual attribute based on the result of new_record?

4

Fabrice Fabrisss wrote in post #972422:

hello,

find_or_create_by has a different behaviour according to the existence of the instance in the database,

is it possible to know the resulting operation (find or create) which has been actually executed ?

Why do you care? What's your use case?

thank you,

Fabrice

Best,

5

Thank you for your answers,

I like the solution with the 'initialize' function but I still haven't tried it.

I have a counter which counts the number of new occurence I will insert in the database, that's why I want to be able to distinguish both cases,

Sincerely,

Fabrice

6

Please quote when replying.

Fabrice Fabrisss wrote in post #972838:

Thank you for your answers,

I like the solution with the 'initialize' function but I still haven't tried it.

I have a counter which counts the number of new occurence I will insert in the database, that's why I want to be able to distinguish both cases,

Please explain further. I strongly suspect that there is a better way to accomplish what you're trying to do -- perhaps having the count done on the DB side would be useful.

Sincerely,

Fabrice

Best,