I was led to believe that the difference between Object.find and Object.find_by_id is that find will raise a RecordNotFound exception whereas find_by_id simply returns nil if nothing is found.
However, in my Rails 3 app if I attempt to search my Uploads model with a bogus id I get:
ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound in UploadsController#show
Couldn't find Upload with id=59
Request
Parameters:
{"id"=>"59"}
Here is the line of code thats messing up:
@upload = Upload.find_by_id(params[:id])
I'm using Rails 3.1.3.
This turned out to be a problem with the Impressionist gem that I'm using as it was hooked into my Upload show action and tried to execute it's own find before I had a chance to deal with it.