Adding validations on the fly.

Hello,

In some situations I'd like to extend single objects with additional virtual attributes and validation methods for them, for example:

@foo = Foo.find(param[:id])

class << @foo   def bar     nil   end

  validates_presence_of :bar end

puts @foo.valid?

However, what is puzzling is that this still returns true... Can anyone point me at what I'm doing wrong?

Your call to validates_presence_of addss a validation on the singleton class of @foo where it will never be executed. You'd need to add the validation to the class Foo

  @foo.class.validates_presence_of :bar

but then it would be active for all instances of Foo in the same process. Much better to add the validation to the class proper and guard it with a condition

  class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base     validates_presence_of :bar, :if => ...   end

Michael