The Easiest Way to Peek Inside Any Rails Model

Want to peek inside your model instance? This one method shows everything.

✅ The One-Liner

product.attributes

➡️ Returns a full hash of all model fields and their values:

{
  "id"=>1,
  "name"=>"Shoes",
  "price"=>99.0,
  "created_at"=>...,
  "updated_at"=>...
}

🔍 Why It’s Useful

• Quickly inspect an object’s data
• Serialize easily to JSON or logs
• Great for debugging and dynamic APIs

⚡ Pro Tip

Exclude sensitive fields like this:

product.attributes.except("created_at", "updated_at")

Or convert to JSON for APIs:

product.attributes.to_json

🧾 TL;DR