This is almost certainly not of interest to the non-technical regulars here, but I’m hoping it’ll save someone down the road some time.<\/p>\n
At work I was having a hard time with what should have been a simple problem: we use paperclip<\/a> for image uploads, and create a corresponding Photo object in the database. It is not<\/em> necessary to have a database backing paperclip uploads in general, but in our case, it was. (In fact, with some polymorphism, too. Many things have Photos.)<\/p>\n The problem is that paperclip has a feature that’s useful in 99% of cases: if you delete a Photo record (or whatever object has_attached_file), it will delete the object off of disk. This makes a lot of sense: if you tell the database to delete the reference to a photo, you probably want to get rid of the disk. The problem is that I did not. We wanted to preserve (“orphan,” a purist might argue) the image \/ “attached” file on disk even when you called Object.destroy.<\/p>\n After a while of trying to figure out how to do this in paperclip, I finally found this discussion<\/a>. The answer, it turns out, is that you hack in. In the object that has the attachment (Photo for me), you override paperclip’s destroy_attached_files and just have it return true. Your neutered version takes precedence of paperclip’s, and the photos sit on disk with no reference in the database.<\/p>\n Incidentally, I’ve found that I’m a grumpy curmudgeon who hates tools that “just work,” largely because when they don’t<\/em> “just work” in some obscure situation, it’s a real pain to try to figure out why. People always say not to fight Rails. The thing I didn’t realize is that they don’t mean, “It will create a little extra work for you.” They mean, “You will want to change careers.”<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is almost certainly not of interest to the non-technical regulars here, but I’m hoping it’ll save someone down the road some time. At work I was having a hard time with what should have been a simple problem: we … Continue reading