Rails 5 adds ignored_columns for Active Record

Sometimes we need to ignore a database column. However Rails 4.x doesn't have any officially defined method which ignores a database column from Active Record. We can apply our patch on model to ignore certain columns.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base

  # Ignoring employee_email column
  def self.columns
    super.reject {|column| column.name == 'employee_email'}
  end

end

Rails 5 has added ignored_columns to ActiveRecord::Base class.

Here is revised code after using ignored_columns method.

class User < ApplicationRecord
  self.ignored_columns = %w(employee_email)
end