what is best practice to indicate exception/error in controller?

Hi all,

Just getting familiar with rails and am performing some checks in a method within a controller. If the checks fail, I would like to indicate to the user a custom error message and stop the update (the method is updating a record in the model).

What are best practices to do this? I understand that for form validation I should be putting validation checks in the model however this is quite different. Should I be raising an exception?

Ideally, I would like to indicate the error to the user in a similar fashion as when a form validation fails.

Thanks!

I would say it depends on your coding style. I ignored exceptions for a long time and I am still not sure whether to use them or not (heard that stack traces are quite expensive). But i would say it comes down to a specific coding style. Some people prefer boolean conditions, others exceptions. For simple things I would for an if-condition as it does not break the execution of the application, while exception will stop the current flow and "goto" somewhere else in the code. I use them for global stuff like authentication and permission checks, not for in page stuff. But as a business master this is only what i learned... a professional might have a different opinion on that topic :wink:

Max