I have a requirement to record the last accessed date and time on several tables. I desire to do this in a local modification to AR using an initializer. I am looking at timestamp.rb to see how Rails handles the builtin timestamp attributes, but I am completely lost. Can some one explain to me what this code is doing?
module ActiveRecord module Timestamp def self.included(base) #:nodoc: base.alias_method_chain :create, :timestamps base.alias_method_chain :update, :timestamps
base.class_inheritable_accessor :record_timestamps, :instance_writer => false base.record_timestamps = true end
private def create_with_timestamps #:nodoc: if record_timestamps ...
I can figure out what the private method in timestamp.rb does, and it is pretty much what I want to do with my custom attributes. What I cannot figure out is how it is invoked. As far as I can determine, the only methods defined as :timestamps occur in the abstract connector class while the attribute record_timestamps occurs, and is referenced, only within timestamp.rb itself.
My interpretation of this is that the base.class_inheritable_accessor creates a virtual attribute called record_timestamps, prohibits creation of a setter, and sets the attribute value to true. But, I have no idea how or where the create_with_timestamps method is called. And I cannot fathom what the method_chain is doing since the only timestamps method that I can find has to do with setting up columns in the schema via migrations. Finally, I do not see where the configuration value of config.record_timestamps is used.