Delete considered harmful

February 28, 2008 by thilo

We just encountered a bug in one of our rails applications where we had accidentally used some_mode.delete instead of some_model.destroy. I think delete should not be a public method on ActiveRecord. After all it’s just some evil means to circumvent all those rails callbacks and stuff to gain some more performance when deleting objects. It should be a protected method or something so that requires some effort (i.e. model.send(:delete)) to call it so you don’t use it accidentally when you actually want to call destroy.

This entry was posted on February 28, 2008 by thilo.