title: Rails: accessing field value from model method
body: <p>Just started learning Rails (3).  I am tearing my hair out trying to find how to do something presumably utterly trivial: access the value of a model instance's field, from inside a method on that model.</p>
  
  <p>In my case:</p>
  
  <pre><code>def formal_name
    @title + " " + @forename + " " + @surname
  end
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>All three @properties (which are all fields on the table in the database) return <code>nil</code>.  They shouldn't.</p>
  
  <p>Incredibly, how to access fields isn't discussed at <a href="http://guides.rails.info/" rel="noreferrer">http://guides.rails.info/</a>, and google turns up nothing.</p>
  
  <p>BTW, I'm coming from Django where this stuff is obvious.</p>