Newbie seeking advice on DRYing up my model validations...

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi,

Despite close reading of Matz's Ruby book and Agile Web Dev. w. Rails, I can't figure out how to tackle the challenge of sharing validation code across models with attributes in common.

In each of my models I'd like to validate the shared attributes with a custom validator that includes Rails ActiveRecord::Validations class methods and some of my own validations. My problem is 1) I don't know how to pass attribute references to my special method and 2) (mundane) I can't successfully call any ActiveRecord::Validations class methods from within my custom method.

A bit of garbage here, I know, but any thoughts? Is this kind of problem handled by use of certain gems?

Thanks,

Grar

2

Hi Grar,

If you have a User model where you want to use some shared validations, you could create a module like this – in lib/my_email_validations.rb:

module MyEmailValidations def self.included(base) base.validates_presence_of :email base.validates_length_of :email, :minimum => 6 base.validate :email_must_be_from_valid_provider end

# example of a custom validator
def email_must_be_from_valid_provider
  errors.add :email, "must be from a valid provider" if
    email !~ /@[gmail.com](http://gmail.com)$/
end

end

and in your User model, include them like this:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base include MyEmailValidations end

Does this solve your problem?

/Lasse

3

Lasse,

Yes, that was exactly what I needed.

I see I need to explore the specifics of mixing in (which maybe Matz's book underserves) -- in this case it was the self.include(base) expression that was key.

Finally, where attributes refer logically to the same kind of data, but have different names, I have aliased them to allow the broadest use of my version of your validation module.

Thanks so much,

Grar

4

Nice – glad you could use it :slight_smile:

/Lasse