Attributes

Attributes

Each model has its own set of attributes.

Definition

Some of those attributes can be used only in create, some can be updated, and others are readonly. Take BraintreeRails::Customer for example:

:create => [:company, :custom_fields, :email, :fax, :first_name, :id, :last_name, :options, :phone, :website],
:update => [:company, :custom_fields, :email, :fax, :first_name, :last_name, :options, :phone, :website],
:readonly => [:created_at, :updated_at]

You can assign id when creating a customer, but you can't update it. created_at and updated_at are readonly attributes. So, when updating a customer object, id, created_at and updated_at will be ignored.

You can get a flattened list of all the attributes through a class method

BraintreeRails::Customer.attributes

Serialization

BraintreeRails models implements the ActiveRecord serialization interface. So you can do the following:

customer.attributes # => returns a hash with all the attributes and their current values
customer.as_json # => returns a hash with root key being the name of the model
customer.to_xml # => returns xml representation of the customer object