Why is my Rails model custom setter/getter method failing? - ruby-on-rails-3

Question

what am I doing wrong here?
I have a model for an app I am writing called page. Those attributes are:
title
pagetype
page_url
title and pagetype can be set as normally, but I used a custom getter/setter for the page_url. Here is the logic/model:
class Page < ActiveRecord::Base
def page_url=()
temp = self[:title]
pageUrl = temp.gsub(" ", "_").downcase
if self[:pagetype] == "home"
pageUrl = "/"
end
self[:page_url] = pageUrl
end
def page_url
self[:page_url]
end
end
It's fairly simple -> page_url is based on the title with all spaces replaced with unless page_type == "home", which then gets set to "/". For the record I don't want to make page_url virtual because I need it to be searchable and saved in the db.
So unfortunately whether in rails console or my app this is failing. Here is how I am calling the setter method in the console;
page1 = Page.new
page1.pagetype = "home"
page1.title = "this is a test"
page2 = Page.new
pager2.pagetype = "content"
page2.title = "this is another test"
#expected results should be
page1.page_url()
=> "/"
page2.page_url()
However I keep getting this:
page1.page_url()
=> nil
What the heck am I doing wrong here?

Answer 1

These custom setter and getters don't persist to the database. If you have a column page_url in your database, you can set the value with a callback. E.g. before_save:
class Page < ActiveRecord::Base
before_save :set_page_url
def set_page_url
if self[:pagetype] == "home"
self.page_url = "/"
else
self.page_url = self[:title].gsub(" ", "_").downcase
end
end
end