How to toggle a Boolean attribute in a controller action

Question

I have an action that simply toggles the #active attribute to the opposite boolean state:

• If @blog.active == true then update it to inactive
• If @blog.active == false then update it to active

I got the following custom action in a controller to work, but there has to be some Rails way to more elegantly do this:

class BlogsController < ApplicationController

  ...    

  def toggle_active
    if @blog.active?
      @blog.update(active: false)
    else
      @blog.update(active: true)
    end
  end

end

Is there a Rails way of updating a boolean attribute to the opposite boolean state?

Answer 1

ActiveRecord has the toggle and toggle! methods which do this. Just keep in mind that the toggle! method skips validation checks.

class BlogsController < ApplicationController

  ...    

  def toggle_active
    @blog.toggle!(:active)
  end

end

If you want to run validations you can do

@blog.toggle(:active).save

You can read the source code for the methods here