Custom pre-validation

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi. I'm trying to do a pre-validation in a form. What I need is to do some validations, then, depending on this validation, ask a couple of questions to the user and to process the form, including the user's answers.

For instance

Name: John Last name: Doe Country: Mars

I need to validate the existence of the country but just to give a warning to the user. Something like

"The country is not on our database. Some features won't be available for you. Do you want to proceed?" And a yes/no checkbox.

I did a custom validation in the controller and it works but, since I'm not using the ActiveRecord validation way, the values of the form are not retained.

Is there an ActiveRecord/Rails/Elegant way of doing this?

Thanks

2

I did a custom validation in the controller and it works but, since I'm not using the ActiveRecord validation way, the values of the form are not retained.

why don't you use the custom validation? in your view you could check with myrecord.errors.on(:country) if there's an error on country and show the checkbox if necessary

Is there an ActiveRecord/Rails/Elegant way of doing this?

yes. use the normal way if that's not possible, you can keep the form values by generating a new record (without saving) and filling a form (maybe invisible) with the values, so they're handed back again later

3

Thorsten Mueller wrote:

in your view you could check with myrecord.errors.on(:country) if there's an error on country and show the checkbox if necessary

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think if I do it that way (using myrecord.errors), the validation would prevent me from saving the record. Usually that's the expected behaviour but in my case I want the validation just for a warning.

Thanks for your answer.

Greetings.

4

Most of the validates_* methods accept an :if parameter where you can place your conditional logic.

5

Most of the validates_* methods accept an :if parameter where you can place your conditional logic.

They do, but how can I include a checkbox as a validation's response. Currently, I'm doing

def validate

  if self.country.not_exist?     errors.add("Country does not exist. Do you want to proceed?" +     "OK<input id='contact_proceed' name='contact[proceed]' type='checkbox'" +     "value='1' /><input name='contact[proceed]' type='hidden' value='0' />"   end end

Actually, it's working but I don't like at all this implementation so I'm still hoping a better solution.

Thanks.

6

You have get your checkbox's value into the model. I do this by merging the object into the params:

params[:foo].merge( :foo => foo )

Then inside the model add an :if to the validation, something like this:

:if => Proc.new { |model| model.foo.checkbox_fieldname == 1 }