Allow overriding column setter

[mloughran]

Apologies if this is possible and I've overlooked.

I'm struggling to understand why the custom Account#email= method in the following does not get called:

require "spec"
require "clear"

class Account
  include Clear::Model

  column email : String

  def email=(e : String)
    super(email.downcase.strip)
  end
end

describe Account do
  it "overrides email setter" do
    account = Account.new
    account.email = "FOO@example.com "
    account.email.should eq("foo@example.com")
  end
end

Is there a better way of achieving this? Thanks!

[Vici37]

I think clear implements a lot of defs in a finished macro, which would be defined after your own email= def, overwriting whatever you had with its own. You should be able to overwrite its own def with yours by wrapping your method with a finished macro:

macro finished
  def email=(e : String)
    previous_def(email.downcase.strip)
  end
end

No idea if you still have this problem, since it was posted so long ago 😬

[Vici37]

And thinking about it, you might want to replace super with previous_def, since you don't want to call the parent classes' method of email=, which doesn't exist for Object, only the previous definition of it.

[mloughran]

@Vici37 thanks – I can confirm that using macro finished and previous_def does indeed allow overriding the setter method. As a newcomer to crystal/clear I would say this was not particularly obvious!

I ended up writing a before :validate hook method to perform this cleanup. This would seem to be the way to go since column= methods are not called when mass assigning values (unlike in sequel from which I was porting some code).