#1 √ resolved
Brandon Valentine

Missing require 'active_record' in encrypted_strings.rb?

Reported by Brandon Valentine | July 6th, 2008 @ 07:29 PM

In several of the encryptor modules you call cattr_accessor which is an ActiveRecord method. On my system I get a dependency error when including encrypted_attributes (which includes encrypted_strings) into a Rails app unless I add require 'active_record' to encrypted_strings.rb.

I am running Rails 2.0.2 on Ruby 1.8.6 on Mac OS X 10.5.4. Rails is installed via gem as is encrypted_strings (and encrypted_attributes). I have the following in my environment.rb: 

require 'rubygems'
require 'encrypted_attributes'

If I try to run ./script/console (or any other Rails command) I get: 

% ./script/console 
Loading development environment (Rails 2.0.2)
/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/encrypted_strings-0.0.4/lib/encrypted_strings/symmetric_encryptor.rb:44:NoMethodError: undefined method `cattr_accessor' for PluginAWeek::EncryptedStrings::SymmetricEncryptor:Class
/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-2.0.2/lib/action_controller/dispatcher.rb:88:NoMethodError: undefined method `cattr_accessor' for ActionController::Dispatcher:Class

Adding require 'active_record' to the top of encrypted_strings.rb fixes it for me. Not sure if this is the correct fix, but it does seem to be working.

Comments and changes to this ticket

  • Aaron Pfeifer

    Aaron Pfeifer July 6th, 2008 @ 08:21 PM

    At what point are you loading the plugin during the initialization process? I agree that there's an assumption that cattr_accessor is available from the active_support library and that's definitely something worth investigating. However, if you use the following in your environment configuration, does it fix things? 

    Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
  ...
  config.gem 'encrypted_attributes'
  ...
end

    The difference here is that these gem dependencies are loaded after the Rails environment has been loaded in the same way the plugins are.

  • Brandon Valentine

    Brandon Valentine July 6th, 2008 @ 11:13 PM

    Indeed that did fix the problem. Thanks for the reply, Aaron. I'm a bit new to Rails and hadn't run across the config.gem syntax anywhere yet. =)

  • Aaron Pfeifer

    Aaron Pfeifer July 7th, 2008 @ 09:57 PM

    • → State changed from “new” to “resolved”

    No problem. Thanks for bringing to my attention some rogue dependencies on active_support. I've since spent time ensuring that the "Ruby" extensions like encrypted_strings only rely on Ruby and not on third-party libraries like active_support.

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Provides dead-simple string encryption/decryption syntax

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