ActiveRecord Attributes And Defaults - The Old Way Imagine that you are in a vacation rental industry and you are adding a new model for handling reservations for rentals, let’s call it Reservation. To keep it simple for the purpose of this example, let’s assume that we need start_date and end_date date fields for handling the duration of the reservations and price field, which is pretty useful unless you are developing an app for a charity organization ;). Let’s say we want to provide some defaults for the start_date and end_date attributes to be