rails + validations -- place them in application.rb?

rubyonrails-talk
1

I need to put a set of validations in a place that can be accessed by multiple controllers... do I just place them in application.rb?

Thanks,

Josh

2

I need to put a set of validations in a place that can be accessed by multiple controllers...

That doesn't entirely make sense - validations are a model thing. are you trying to share code between models ?

Fred

3

So, the validation is something like this…

validate_duplicate_artist(artist_id, venue_id, event_time)

rather than a validate_xxx_of type deal, these are more in depth validations…

does that make sense? i figured the best place would be somewhere in the model, but with the way it is set up, i figured application.rb would be the best. it needs to be accessed in many places.

thanks

4

So, the validation is something like this...

validate_duplicate_artist(artist_id, venue_id, event_time)

rather than a validate_xxx_of type deal, these are more in depth validations...

does that make sense? i figured the best place would be somewhere in the model, but with the way it is set up, i figured application.rb would be the best. it needs to be accessed in many places.

application.rb is a bit of a misnomer (in that the name makes it sounds like it's some sort of thing for the whole app). It just contains the parent class of all of your controllers, so if what you're doing isn't controller related (it isn't) then it doesn't belong there. You could stick your validations in a module and include that them into the models that need them or just include them into Active Record itself (google for adding custom validations for some more lengthy explanations).

Fred

5

Thanks, that’s just what I was looking for. I’ll just write my own custom validations.

Josh

6

One more thing... I think I made the mistake of making the "set of validations" sound like validate_xxx_of type functions... if I am needing the following functions to be global (this is some old code, but just for example) could i just add them to application_helper?

  def validate_duplicate_artist(artist)     # Query DB for the given artist     @result = Artist.find(:first, :conditions => [ "name = ?", artist])     # If no matches, then go ahead and add     if @result.nil?       # calls parser function to clean up the artist to a general format       artist_parsed = validate_artist_parser(artist)       # pp artist_parsed       Artist.all.each do |artist|         # calls parser function to clean up the artist from db to the general format         artist_db = validate_artist_parser(artist.name)         if artist_parsed == artist_db           # if the db artist and crawled artist find a match, then return the id and status of that artist           return {:id => artist.id, :status => artist.status}         end       end       return {:id => 0, :status => "dup"}      else         return {:id => @result.id, :status => @result.status}      end   end

  def validate_artist_parser(artist)     a = artist.downcase       a.gsub!(/ & /, " ")       a.gsub!(/ and /, " ")       a.gsub!(/ an /, " ")       a.gsub!(/ the /, " ")       a.gsub!(/ a /, " ")       a.gsub!(/\./, "")       a.gsub!(/,/, "")       a.gsub!(/'/, "")       a.gsub!(/-/, "")       a.gsub!(/!/, "")       a.gsub!(/’/, "")       a.gsub!(/ /, "")       return a.downcase   end

These are validations that need to be accessed from an admin tool and a crawler_controller... It just looks like adding to the active record validation.rb file might not be the right place. Maybe I'm wrong?

7

These are validations that need to be accessed from an admin tool and a crawler_controller... It just looks like adding to the active record validation.rb file might not be the right place. Maybe I'm wrong?

Maybe not in this case. Personally the first one at least sounds like something that could be a class method of artist - Artist.find_by_name_trying_really_hard

Fred