Strange Problem With Unwanted, Transient Caching

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hello,

I hope somebody can explain to me what's going on here because I'm baffled!

In a controller's action I want to create a new order for a customer. Because I post back to the same action (not RESTful I know, but that's for another day) I use code like this:

   def edit      @order = Order.find_by_id(params[:id]) || Order.new      ...    end

I noticed that when params[:id] is nil, the finder still retrieves an order -- the order whose id matches the :customer_id which is in my params hash. Weird.

I then noticed that if I ran the finder a second time, it correctly returned nil. Weirder.

And I found the same behaviour if I replaced the find_by_id with find_by_sql using the SQL statement it generated in the log. A weird clue?

Putting all this another way, this code generates the output below:

   def edit      puts "params: #{params.inspect}"      puts "params[:id].nil?: #{params[:id].nil?}"      o = Order.find_by_id(id)      puts "order: #{o.nil? ? 'nil' : o.inspect}"      o = Order.find_by_id(id)      puts "order: #{o.nil? ? 'nil' : o.inspect}"

     ...    end

This prints out:

   params: {"action"=>"edit", "controller"=>"orders", "customer_id"=>"1375"}    params[:id].nil?: true    order: #<Order:0x35f9a5c @attributes={"id"=>"1375", "customer_id"=>"502", "required_at"=>nil, "created_at"=>"2004-01-22 12:00:00"}>    order: nil

So my questions are:

- Why does this finder/query pull out an order the first time instead of nil? - Why is the order it wrongly pulls out the one whose id matches the customer_id? - Why does the query magically work the second time? - Have I lost the plot? :slight_smile:

The fact that find_by_sql exhibits the same weird behaviour leads me to suspect the database (MySQL). But if that were caching, surely it would return the same result both times?

Thanks and regards, Andy Stewart

2

Andy:

Yeah, that's weird. I haven't seen anything like it. However, I just
want to confirm if you made a typo in your code:

    def edit       puts "params: #{params.inspect}"       puts "params[:id].nil?: #{params[:id].nil?}"

      o = Order.find_by_id(id) # SHOULD THIS BE params[:id] ???

      puts "order: #{o.nil? ? 'nil' : o.inspect}"       o = Order.find_by_id(id)       puts "order: #{o.nil? ? 'nil' : o.inspect}"

      ...     end

If id really is nil, then I'm stumped.

-Anthony

3

Andrew Stewart wrote:

   def edit      @order = Order.find_by_id(params[:id]) || Order.new      ...    end

I noticed that when params[:id] is nil, the finder still retrieves an order -- the order whose id matches the :customer_id which is in my params hash. Weird.

I then noticed that if I ran the finder a second time, it correctly returned nil. Weirder.

And I found the same behaviour if I replaced the find_by_id with find_by_sql using the SQL statement it generated in the log. A weird clue?

4

Hi Anthony,

Yes, that is a typo in my email. In my code I have this line just
above the first 'o = Order.find...' line:

id = params[:id]

...so that I could check that id really was what I thought it was. I
lost it as I wrote the email in a copy-paste mishap.

I can't reproduce this in the console but it happens every time via
the browser. Bizarre.

Thanks for looking into it, Andy

Yeah, that's weird. I haven't seen anything like it. However, I just want to confirm if you made a typo in your code:

    def edit       puts "params: #{params.inspect}"       puts "params[:id].nil?: #{params[:id].nil?}"

      o = Order.find_by_id(id) # SHOULD THIS BE params[:id] ???

Yes! That's what it was in my actual code (rather than this email).

      puts "order: #{o.nil? ? 'nil' : o.inspect}"       o = Order.find_by_id(id)

And this one too: ^^

5

Mark,