All of the sudden some columns began to misbehave in cucumber tests, claiming that “Attempt to call private method (NoMethodError)” on normal column attributes!

A simple fix for this, essentially saying that a method is not private when its a column:

#features/support/ar_private_fix.rb required from env.rb
unless ActiveRecord::Base.methods.include?('private_method_defined_with_fix?')
  class ActiveRecord::Base
    class << self
      def private_method_defined_with_fix?(method)
        return false if columns_hash.keys.include?(method.to_s)
        private_method_defined_without_fix?(method)
      end
      alias_method_chain :private_method_defined?, :fix
    end
  end
end