Rails 4 override a model attribute with parent attribute

Question

What is the best way to achieve the following in Rails 4? Parent and child model have the same attribute. If child model hasn't set said attribute then it inherits from the parent, otherwise, it renders its own value.

I tried to create a method in the child method with the same name as the model attribute to do the logic, but that causes a stack level too deep error.

  def age_of_seniority
    age_of_seniority.present? ? age_of_seniority : borough.age_of_seniority
  end

Update

I don't want to change the method name, I would like to be able to access it as a normal attribute

Answer 1

You can do this using read_attribute

def age_of_seniority
  read_attribute(:age_of_seniority) || borough.age_of_seniority
end