ActiveRecord accessor dot(.) vs bracket([])

Question

With Active Record, we can access a value like

method access

user = User.find(1)
user.name #=> 'John'

or

hash access

user[:name] #=> 'John'

I just wonder when to use which, or is there any best practice out there? Personally I'd prefer method access because I feel that is more like ruby way. However when I see code by others, I face the hash access.

Answer 1

Rails convention is to use ActiveRecord::AttributeMethods::Read#read_attribute (dot notation), rather than its alias ActiveRecord::AttributeMethods#[], which:

Returns the value of the attribute identified by attr_name after it has been typecast (for example, “2004-12-12” in a date column is cast to a date object, like Date.new(2004, 12, 12)). It raises ActiveModel::MissingAttributeError if the identified attribute is missing.