ActiveRecord find method is quite flexible
Every day, a new discovery about a Rails feature :-)
It sounds like the "find" methods is not too picky about its parameter, if given a string instead of an integer, it will the find the record anyway. I wonder if the author of this code knew about it ...
Event.find("7476-taranna")
=> #Event id: 7476, name: "Tarannà", place_id: 484, ...
Update:
After Marius' comment, I googled a bit and found a post by Obie Fernandez which explains the whole thing in details ...
Amsterdam 2008
2008
2007 & 2008
2 comments:
Actually, this functionality is often used for creating somewhat search engine friendly URLs. If you define a custom to_param method in an ActiveRecord::Base subclass, like this:
def to_param
"#{id}-#{title.gsub(/\s/,"_")}"
end
your model will emit something like
123-we_have_a_winner
when used with link_to etc. But active record will call to_i on this parameter before using it in a find call, which leaves it up to String#to_i to return the correct identifier. And "123-we_have_a_winner".to_i returns ... 123
The author of the Model had added a to_param method which behaves exactly like Marius said ...
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