Rails sets the default boolean in the model

Question

I am writing a simple blog application in Rails, version 3.2.8. I fixed the posts resource as follows:

rails g scaffold post title:string body:string islive:boolean 

I want to set islive to false by default, and I'm trying to do this in my model. I also decided that I did not want it to be available for mass use, so I encoded my model as follows:

 class Post < ActiveRecord::Base attr_accessible :body, :title before_save :default_values def default_values self.islive = false end end 

I also deleted the islive field from my form. The problem is that when I try to create a new record with the model as described above, it is not saved. The console looks like this:

 Started POST "/posts" for 127.0.0.1 at 2012-10-14 18:23:30 +0100 Processing by PostsController#create as HTML Parameters: {"utf8"=>"✓", "authenticity_token"=>"/lNa21JBeBz/H2cYLqAsF8uWr1frLV88WsOVKzOqwb4=", "post"=> {"title"=>"sample title", "body"=>"the body"}, "commit"=>"Create Post"} (0.1ms) begin transaction (0.0ms) rollback transaction Rendered posts/_form.html.erb (1.8ms) Rendered posts/new.html.erb within layouts/application (2.5ms) Completed 200 OK in 29ms (Views: 26.3ms | ActiveRecord: 0.1ms) 

And nothing is saved. I just get begin transaction rollback transaction However, if I change default_values to this:

 def default_values self.islive = 'false' end 

everything works and it saves a fine, with a falsey value for islive . Even if I just do something like this:

 def default_values self.islive = false Rails.logger.debug self.islive end 

then conservation is saved.

Can someone shed light on why this is so?

Answer 1

before_save , and other callbacks stop saving if they return false . This is exactly what you did. This is a trap if you forget about it. You can put some true (or even nil ) in the last line:

 def default_values self.islive = false true end