private_field

Make Rails fields private to avoid those lazy temptations.

Background

It's easy to fall into the temptation of modifying model fields in random places (like your views), but this just makes the world worse. In most cases, it's a better idea to define a method within your model or service class that's responsible for handling all of your data manipulation.

This gem enforces that rule by allowing for private field definitions.

Now you may be thinking, "That's already possible, just override the accessors." And you'd be right, but I'm lazy and think that writing:

private_field :id

is easier than writing:

field :id
private attr_accessor :id

Config

This is the best (or worst) part: there's no config because I wrote this for one specific use case and don't feel like writing config stuff that I won't use. Feel free to submit a pr if it doesn't suit your needs.

All this was written for Mongoid (I'm sorry), so it may take a bit of tweaking to make work for other ORMs.

How to

Just do private_field :field_name instead of field :field_name. If you're feeling feisty, you can do readable_field :field_name to make the reader public and the writer private.

MAKE SURE THAT YOU DO include Mongoid::Document OR WHATEVER ORM YOU'RE USING THIS ISN'T A REPLACEMENT FOR THAT CRAP.