Hello Everyone I''m trying to overwrite a default accessor in my model to use the IPAddr class to convert a 4-byte string stored in the database to a human-readable IP address. Like this: class Host < ActiveRecord::Base def ip_address IPAddr.new_ntoh(read_attribute("ip_address")) end # ...other stuff end In my templates I use things like <%= @host.ip_address %> to get a nice dotted quad representation of the IP address. But when I use <%= text_field ''host'', ''ip_address'' %> in a form, to be able to edit the addresses of my hosts, Rails doesn''t seem to be using my accessor, and instead produces a four character string. I could of course type the HTML for the input field and use the method I know is working, but that would be like cheating, wouldn''t it? Asking for help isn''t cheating, hence this post. Any help is most welcome. More details: * In MySQL, the ip_address field is a varchar(4) (even though I created it as a char(4)). * I''m running Rails 0.11.1 with Ruby 1.8.2 on Debian Sarge. -martin