Ruby on Rails

I have been working on updating a rails application to 4.0 and spent some time getting to the bottom of why it wasn't working.

What I found was, if a model has a method_missing definition then it is called instead of any accessors. This causes any model set-up to fail.

The following example demonstrates the problem:

class Item < ActiveRecord::Base    attr_accessible :name, :content    store :content      def method_missing(id, *args)       puts "method missing: #{id}"    end  end

In Rails 3.2.14:

$ rails console  Loading development environment (Rails 3.2.14)  2.0.0p247 :001 > x = Item.new(name: 'foo')   => #<Item id: nil, name: "foo", content: {}, created_at: nil, updated_at: nil>   2.0.0p247 :002 >

and in Rails 4.0.0:

$ rails console  Loading development environment (Rails 4.0.0)  2.0.0p247 :001 > x = Item.new(name: 'foo')  method missing: name=   => #<Item id: nil, name: nil, content: {}, created_at: nil, updated_at: nil>   2.0.0p247 :002 > 

In Rails 3.2.14, the name attribute is set to foo as is the intention. In Rails 4.0.0, however, see that method_missing is called and the attribute is not set.

I can work around this by manually invoking the upward method_missing chain:

def method_missing(id, *args)     super    if respond_to? id      send(id,*args)    else      puts "method missing: #{id}"    end   end 

I don't understand why this happens, or if I am doing something wrong. Would someone with more knowledge of the internals be able to explain this ?