Rails - Feb 2006 - Where is a good place to update a date field?

I have a field that indicate that a reservation has been cancelled.  I want
to update a cancellation_date field with the date that the reservation is
cancelled.  I am trying to think of where the best place to do that is?

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Dave
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On 2/4/06, David Clements <digidigo@gmail.com>
wrote:
>
>  I have a field that indicate that a reservation has been cancelled.  I
want
> to update a cancellation_date field with the date that the reservation is
> cancelled.  I am trying to think of where the best place to do that is?
>
I like this kind of thing:

class Reservation < ActiveRecord::Base
  def cancelled?
    !self[:cancellation_date].nil?
  end
  def cancel
    self[:cancellation_date] = Date.today
  end
end

This gives you a single place to make changes if you add
pre-requisites or permissions to your Reservation model.  Just call
@reservation.cancel from some controller action, after the user tells
you they want to cancel.
Or, better, something like:
@reservation.cancel unless @reservation.cancelled?

On 2/4/06, Wilson Bilkovich <wilsonb@gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> On 2/4/06, David Clements <digidigo@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >  I have a field that indicate that a reservation has been cancelled. 
I
> want
> > to update a cancellation_date field with the date that the reservation
> is
> > cancelled.  I am trying to think of where the best place to do that
is?
> >
> I like this kind of thing:
>
> class Reservation < ActiveRecord::Base
>   def cancelled?
>     !self[:cancellation_date].nil?
>   end
>   def cancel
>     self[:cancellation_date] = Date.today
>   end
> end
>
> This gives you a single place to make changes if you add
> pre-requisites or permissions to your Reservation model.  Just call
> @reservation.cancel from some controller action, after the user tells
> you they want to cancel.
> Or, better, something like:
> @reservation.cancel unless @reservation.cancelled?

Yeah,  I should have been more clear.

The reservation has a status that can be an number of things and within that
set there is a number of "cancelled" states.  So when the status
changes to
one of the cancelled states I need to set the cancellation date field as
well.

I ended up using the before_update hook for this.  I guess that is a
reasonable place,  but I would say that it is not clear the best place for
setting related fields.  The other option would be to create a trigger, but
it is so easy to just do it with a hook.

Thanks for the response,

Dave
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