Here’s a neat trick I picked up recently. Ruby has a super keyword: when you call it inside a method, super calls the parent class’s implementation of the method with the same name. You can extend ActiveRecord’s built-in methods – like getters and setters – quite neatly with super.

For example, let’s say you have a User model with an email_address attribute. When you update a user’s email address, you want to send a confirmation email to their new address.

So, you would explicitly define an email_address=() method in the User model. Normally ActiveRecord automatically gives you this method. Inside the method, you’d call super. This will call the original implementation of the ActiveRecord setter. Then below that you’d write some code to send a confirmation email (or call a separate method that does that, or whatever – this example is a bit contrived). At the end of the method, you’d return the new email address.

This is a useful way to add extra functionality to the automatically-generated methods from ActiveRecord without overwriting them entirely.