How Active Record Is Put Together
The code in the previous example looks simple, but ActiveRecord::Base is capable of much more than that. Indeed, the more you use Active Record, the more the methods in Base seem to multiply. You might assume that Base is a huge class with thousands of lines of code that define methods such as save or validate.
Surprisingly, the source code of ActiveRecord::Base contains no trace of those methods. This is a common problem for newcomers to Rails: it’s often difficult to understand where a specific method comes from and how it gets into a class such as Base. The rest of this short chapter will look at how ActiveRecord::Base’s functionality is assembled.
Let’s start by taking a step back to the first line in ...
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