@ vs self in models?

rubyonrails-talk
1

i've seen both of these syntaxes before and have also used both in my own models:

class Foo   def get_bar     @bar   end end

and

class Foo   def get_bar     self.bar   end end

seemingly with no difference... i'm a nuby though so could anyone enlighten me to the differences if there are any?

thanks, jeff

2

@bar is an instance variable... self.bar would be a method. Try doing this code in irb and you'll see that calling get_bar in the first version returns nil, while calling it on the second version throws a NoMethodError.

b

jemminger wrote:

3

aha! i guess then the reason it has worked in RoR models is due to AR creating attr_accessors for the table columns, so calling model.some_col was returning @some_col... thanks for clearing that up