Read-only Active Record Objects
The other day, I was trying to make an Active Record query for some data and scope that query down by its associated records when I ran into an interesting error! ActiveRecord::ReadOnlyRecord.
The real example doesn't make a lot of sense without context, so I'll just make up a similar situation.
Let's say I'm looking for promotions that have associated codes that have been redeemed.
promotions = Promotion.joins(:promotion_codes).where("promotion_codes.redeemed_at is not null")
=> [#<Promotion id: 1, user_id: 1, redemptions_count: 0, max_redemptions_count: 100, begins_at: "2020-10-06 04:00:00", expires_at: nil, name: "My cool promo", code: "PROMO", discount_percent: 10, subscription_duration_months: 1, created_at: "2020-10-06 20:28:32", updated_at: "2020-10-06 20:28:32">]The return value here is an ActiveRecord::Relation.
Now, let's say I wanted to go ahead and update each parent promotion record in the collection.
promotions.each do |promotion|
promotion.expires_at = Time.now
promotion.save!
endExecuting the above yields...
(0.3ms) BEGIN
# ...stuff stuff stuff
(0.2ms) ROLLBACK
ActiveRecord::ReadOnlyRecord: ActiveRecord::ReadOnlyRecordAha! A ReadOnlyRecord, what?
Turns out that in Rails 3 when you load associated objects with joins (or includes), the record gets marked as Read Only and the preloaded nested objects are stuffed somewhere in the object seemingly invisible to us.
If we go ahead and selectively select just the attributes pertinent to the promotions table, we will once again be able to perform write operations on our objects.
promotions = Promotion.joins(:promotion_codes).where("promotion_codes.redeemed_at is not null").select("promotions.*")
promotions.each do |promotion|
promotion.expires_at = Time.now
promotion.save!
endNow it works! Hooray.
It looks like this functionality was removed in future versions of Rails, so don't even get me started about why we're on Rails 3. This was just an interesting thing I stumbled upon in the course of work.