Hi List, I was wondering about the status of #5336. There was some input which I think is off-topic as the concerns raised were dealt with in a previous patch. It''s also been badly spammed. Here''s the the latest comment I added (to save finding through the spam) Cheers, Ian White -- What James suggests above (reading nils and setting to nil) has already been proposed and applied (#5091). What I''m proposing here is just to make multi-column aggregations and single-column aggregations consistent. That is, setting the column attributes for a multi-column aggregation will result in the aggregated object being created with no fuss, whereas currently setting the column attribute for a single-column aggregation (the the column is the same name as the relationship) will result in a TypeError. An example of why this is good: model.update_attributes(params[:model]) will not break when you have a single-column aggregation in Model, so writing edit actions in controllers no longer requires knowledge of the model''s aggregations.