Check if record was just destroyed in rails

So there is

record.new_record?

To check if something is new

I need to check if something is on it's way out.

record = some_magic
record.destroy
record.is_destroyed? # => true

Something like that. I know destroying freezes the object, so frozen? sort of works, but is there something explicitly for this task?

Just do it:

record.destroyed?

Details are here ActiveRecord::Persistence

You can do this.

Record.exists?(record.id)

However that will do a hit on the database which isn't always necessary. The only other solution I know is to do a callback as theIV mentioned.

attr_accessor :destroyed
after_destroy :mark_as_destroyed
def mark_as_destroyed
  self.destroyed = true
end

And then check record.destroyed.

This is coming very soon. In the latest Riding Rails post, it says this:

> And finally, it's not necessarily > BugMash-related, but José Valim - > among dozens of other commits - added > model.destroyed?. This nifty method > will return true only if the instance > you're currently looking at has been > successfully destroyed.

So there you go. Coming soon!

destroying an object doesn't return anything other than a call to freeze (as far as I know) so I think frozen? is your best bet. Your other option is to rescue from ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound if you did something like record.reload.

I think Mike's tactic above could be best, or you could write a wrapper for these cases mentioned if you want to start 'making assumptions'.

Cheers.

While record.destroyed? works fine, and does return true or false, you can also DRY this up a little bit and create the if condition on the line you call destroy on in your controller.

record = Object.find(params[:id])
if record.destroy
  ... happy path
else
  ... sad path
end

Realize this post is a bit late in the game. But should anyone want to discuss this more, i'm game! Side note: I also had an after_destroy validation on my model and while it worked, a separate method for something like this seems like overkill ;)

Without knowing more of the logic of your app, I think that frozen? is your best bet.

Failing that, you could certainly add a "destroyed" attribute to your models that you trigger in the callbacks and that could be checked against if you want a more precise solution.