Working With Rails

Validate Attributes

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Plugin: Validate Attributes

Author: Sur – http://expressica.com, sur.max@gmail.com Homepage: http://expressica.com/plugins/validate_attributes License: This plugin has been released under “Rails’ MIT” license. #############################################################################

Validate Attribute is a plugin which provides a way to extend the functionality of the the rails’ activerecord function valid?. Using this plugin, we can validate any specific attribute(s) or we can skip validating any specific attribute(s).

Following are the ActiveRecord instance methods that will be available after installing this plugin

1.) validate_attributes 2.) validate_attributes_and_save

Examples:

lets assume a User model with some validations as…

class User < ActiveRecord::Base

validates_presence_of :name
validates_length_of :name, :minimum => 5
validates_presence_of :email
validates_presence_of :address

end

1.) validate_attributes

Parameters:
    We can specify attributes as parameters in the form of :only or :except.
    If attributes' arry is given with :only, the method will validate only those attributes.
    If given with :except, it will validate all attributes but skip the specified.

@user = User.new
@user.validate_attributes(:only => ["name"]) # => false
@user.errors.full_messages # =>  ["Name is too short (minimum is 5 characters)", "Name can't be blank"]
@user.name = "sur" 
@user.validate_attributes(:only => ["name"]) # => false
@user.errors.full_messages # =>  ["Name is too short (minimum is 5 characters)"]
@user.validate_attributes(:only => ["name", "email"]) # => false
@user.errors.full_messages # =>  ["Name is too short (minimum is 5 characters)", "Email can't be blank"]
@user.validate_attributes # => false
@user.errors.full_messages # =>  ["Name is too short (minimum is 5 characters)", "Email can't be blank", "Address can't be blank"]

@user = User.new
@user.validate_attributes(:except => ["name", "email"]) # => false
@user.errors.full_messages # =>  ["Address can't be blank"]

@user = User.new
@user.validate_attributes(:only => ["address"]) # => false
@user.errors.full_messages # =>  ["Address can't be blank"]

2.) validate_attributes_and_save

Parameters:
    Same as the method validate_attributes

This method will save the object if the function validate_attributes returns true, and will return true if object gets saved
else return false.

@user = User.new
@user.validate_attributes_and_save(:only => [:address]) # => false
@user.new_record? # => true

@user.address = "http://expressica.com" 
@user.validate_attributes_and_save(:only => [:address]) # => true
@user.new_record? # => false

NOTE: This description has been extracted from the Plugin README and so the formatting may need updating to make browser friendly