Virtual attributes in Rails

sree ilapakurthy wrote in post #1108220:

What do you knew about virtual attriburtes in rails ? Generally we can get idea about attr_accessible and attr_accessor

so what these two can do . i found the difference between these two from this blog. Very useful plz check it

Virtual attributes in Rails | MyWayOnRails;

The first thing you should know is that attar_accessible will be removed from Rails 4 to be replaced by strong parameters.

See here for more:

The attar_accessor is really nothing more than a declarative statement for specifying getters and setters for instance variable (which is really all that virtual attributes are). In anything other than ActiveRecord models "virtual attributes" are called "instance variables." Sometimes these are also called "transient variables" because they are attributes that are to be excluded from persistence either in a serialized format or persistent storage (database). Some languages have specific syntax for transient variables although AFAIK Ruby does not.

Example:

attr_accessible :name

is essentially equivalent to

def name   @name end

def name=(name)   @name = name end