Rails store values from AR result

Question

I have an issue storing the result of a query in a controller:

payments = Payment.select("SecurityKey").where("VendorTxCode = '%#{params[:VendorTxCode]}%'").limit(1)

payments.each do |payment|
    security_key = payment.SecurityKey
end

Later when I use security_key, I get an error that it is undefined. However, when I run this in the rails console as:

payments.each do |payment|
    puts payment.SecurityKey
end
#=> df4g5ds6

How can I store this result in a variable for use later on as my method is not working?

Answer 1

It looks like you need to define your variable before your each do block. Try storing the keys into an array as such:

payments = Payment.select("SecurityKey").where("VendorTxCode = '%#
{params[:VendorTxCode]}%'").limit(1)

security_key = []
payments.each do |payment|
    security_key << payment.SecurityKey
end

And then you can access the keys like security_key[0], etc.