Object Not Initialized in Ruby

Question

I'm working in Rails and have the following class:

class Player < ActiveRecord::Base
    attr_accessor :name, :rating, :team_name
    def initialize(name, rating, team_name)
        @name = name
        @rating = rating
        @team_name = team_name
    end
end

When I run

bundle exec rails console

and try:

a = Player.new("me", 5.0, "UCLA")

I get back:

 => #<Player not initialized>

I have no idea why the Player object wouldn't be initialized here. Any suggestions on what to do / explanation for what might be causing this?

Thanks, Mariogs

Answer 1

have no idea why the Player object wouldn't be initialized here

It's not initilised quite simply because you have not initialised it!

You have overriden the ActiveRecord::Base initialize method but you are not calling through to it it so the Player class is not initialised properly

Just call super

class Player < ActiveRecord::Base
    attr_accessor :name, :rating, :team_name
    def initialize(name, rating, team_name)
        super
        @name = name
        @rating = rating
        @team_name = team_name
    end
end

You probably didn't mean to override the initialize method at all, it's strongly discouraged http://blog.dalethatcher.com/2008/03/rails-dont-override-initialize-on.html, you probably meant to make use of the after_initialize callback so you can split the name, rating and team_rating out from the params hash that is passed in to whatever method causes the player model to be intialised in the first place