Would any Rails developer consider this bad practice?

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Would any Rails developer consider this bad practice?

If so, why?

I am overriding the external_url= setter to ensure URLs start with http://. I’m doing this before any validation because I don’t want to bother the user who enters example.com/foo/bar without http://. I don’t plan on validating the URL at all anyway.

def external_url=(url)
  if !url.match /^https?:\/\//i
    url = "http://#{url}"
  end
  self[:external_url] = url
end

Looks legit! You use attr_accessor when you don't need to change the default behavior of the getter/setter. Don't forget to protect against mass assigment (http://railscasts.com/episodes/26-hackers-love-mass-assignment-revised) :)

Yeah of course! Thanks for your thoughts.