I’m a new-ish part time rails dev, self taught, so I apologize if this is a question that I should know the answer to. I’ve had no luck finding a way to implement soft validations in rails (i.e. the form will give you a warning that certain fields are not right and an option to go back an correct them or to submit the incorrect information).
We have a demographics form that asks for sensitive information–so we would like to let people know if they simply skipped a question accidentally, but permits them to submit the form without having answered all of the questions should they prefer. In case it matters–we’re only looking at radio buttons and check boxes, and we’re only checking to see if the questions were answered.
The only thing I was able to find was a rubyforge gem abandoned over six years ago.
Does anyone know if there is any way to do this with rails?
I'm a new-ish part time rails dev, self taught, so I apologize if this is a question that I should know the answer to. I've had no luck finding a way to implement soft validations in rails (i.e. the form will give you a warning that certain fields are not right and an option to go back an correct them or to submit the incorrect information).
We have a demographics form that asks for sensitive information--so we would like to let people know if they simply skipped a question accidentally, but permits them to submit the form without having answered all of the questions should they prefer. In case it matters--we're only looking at radio buttons and check boxes, and we're only checking to see if the questions were answered.
The only thing I was able to find was a rubyforge gem abandoned over six years ago.
Does anyone know if there is any way to do this with rails?
If you do these optional validations with JavaScript, then they can be independent of the business rules that Rails enforces (the ones that absolutely stop submission). That might be a way to get around this issue.
Not Rails-specific, but: why not simply allow "prefer not to answer"
as an option? That way, you can easily enforce that they must give
*some* kind of response to all questions, but they don't have to
reveal personal info if they don't want to.
it seems like you want to do some validation to improve the user experience, give them some feedback etc.
Without knowing the exact use cases I would go with a combination of client- and server-side validation. On client’s side you can go with one of the various jQuery form validation plugins that suits your needs. On the other hand it’s not that big of a deal to write some custom JavaScript to check for some basic things, like completion of questions etc.
But I would like to stress the point that you definitely should validate the most important things on the server-side (validation in models, see Active Record Validations — Ruby on Rails Guides). To be absolutely sure, you should check the rules on client-side again on server side.
Thanks for the suggestions. I was hoping to avoid client-side validations just because it means replicating a lot of work already done (and my JS/JQuery is not up to snuff, but I should take it as an opportunity to work on that). That will be the route I take, I guess.
Dave: the ‘I prefer not to answer’ is the best option if we assume humans act rationally. However, if you state that as an option many people assume there is some reason that they should not answer and they not only choose not to answer but become more suspicious and tend to drop out of the study. Also, if personal experience is generalizable, many people are lazy and will just click that if they don’t to look up an answer. For these reasons we’d like to avoid cluing them in to the fact that they can skip the question, but we want to let them skip it if they have an actual objection to providing the information.
Max: Yes, I plan to keep the server side validations in check for everything important. These question pertain mostly to demographic information–household income and the like–that people may have objections to sharing, and that won’t destroy our data if they’re absent–just present a less rich picture.
Once again, thanks all for the feedback. It’s encouraging as to someone starting freelance work.
