I’ve started to pick up Rails a few times, always to be interrupted by something–usually either a missing feature that I really needed, or a change in project priorities at work. I finally sat down with it today in an attempt to finish a little project that I’ve been avoiding for months at work.

It was all going well until suddenly one of my classes stopped working right. My Host class belongs_to my Group class. At one point this afternoon, host.group stopped working from inside of my web app. It worked perfectly with the unit tests, but I got a method undefined exception whenever I tried to access the group method on a Host object. Here’s a snippet of the code involved:

class Host < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :group
  belongs_to :customer
  has_and_belongs_to_many :messages, :order=>"id"
end

class Group < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_and_belongs_to_many :packages, :order=>"pkgorder"
  has_many :hosts

  validates_length_of :name, :maximum=>40
  validates_format_of :name, :with => /^[-0-9a-zA-Z.]+$/,
    message=>"may only contain letters, numbers, ., and -"
end

These two classes were in their own files, as generated by Rail’s generator script. Can you see what’s wrong? The line right above end in the Group definition should start with :message, not message. That missing colon in group.rb broke the Host class, but only when it was used after Group was defined. So the unit tests worked, because they tested each class separately, but it failed in a bizarre way when the two were used together.

Things like this make me wonder if maybe Rails isn’t getting just a wee bit too clever for its own good.

Other then that, though, it’s been working great. I’m spending too much time searching the Rails docs for help, but I’m moving right along.