rails 3.1 active record insert or update

Question

I'm new to rails.

Is there an easy way in active record to pass it a hash of data and if the record exists, update it, and if it doesn't, create it?

data = {}
data["my_id"] = 356345
data["description"] = "test123"

w = Descriptions.new(data)

Ideally if I ran the above it would only ever have 1 record, not multiple records each time I ran it.

Answer 1

Assuming you ware wanting the "my_id" bit to be unique you can run

Descriptions.find_or_create_by_my_id(data["my_id"]).update_attributes(data)