Nifty ways to have custom sanitation for columns in Rails

sanitation.rb

# Goal: To clean up surrounding whitespace from a user's first_name field:

# rspec test:

describe User do
  describe "first_name" do
    it "sanitizes surrounding whitespace from column" do
      user = User.new(first_name: " Stafford ")
      expect(user.first_name).to eq "Stafford"
    end
  end
end

# Option 1: overwrite default accessor (used in update/create)
# Source: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Base.html#label-Overwriting+default+accessors

class User > ActiveRecord::Base
  def first_name=(value)
    value ||= ''
    write_attribute(:last_name, value.strip)
  end
end

# Option 2: send first_name= to ActiveRecord::Base module, which uses write_attribute
# Source: https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/e20dd73df42d63b206d221e2258cc6dc7b1e6068/activerecord/lib/active_record/attribute_methods/write.rb

class User > ActiveRecord::Base
  def first_name=(value)
    super((value || '').strip)
  end
end

Interesting. Hadn't really thought about either of these options. I'll keep these in mind when I need to do this in the future.