Rails 5 Not Raising Error with self.errors.add(:base) - ruby-on-rails

Question

I have a model called Thing and a controller called Things.
I followed this tutorial to try and set a maximum amount of Things a user can create.
Here's the warning: the terminal is giving a warning (not a huge issue) of DEPRECATION WARNING: Passing an argument to force an association to reload is now deprecated and will be removed in Rails 5.1. Please call "reload" on the result collection proxy instead. What should I do to make it go away?
Here's the problem: The line self.errors.add(:base, "Exceeded Things Limit") isn't displaying an alert or notice in the view. How would I achieve this? It's not creating a new Thing (because I met the maximum limit of 2) which is good, but it's just reloading a new form which would be horrible for user experience.
I'm working Rails 5 and Devise.
Here's my Thing model:
class Thing < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :user
validate :thing_count_within_limit, :on => :create
attr_accessor :validation_code, :flash_notice
def self.search(search)
if search
where("zipcode LIKE ?", "%#{search}%")
else
all
end
end
def thing_count_within_limit
if self.user.things(:reload).count >= 2
self.errors.add(:base, "Exceeded Things Limit")
end
end
end
And here's my Things controller:
class thingsController < ApplicationController
before_action :find_thing, only: [:show, :edit, :update, :destroy]
before_action :authenticate_user_first, only: [:edit, :update, :destroy]
before_action :authorized_pilot, only: [:edit, :update, :destroy, :profile]
def index
#things = Thing.all.order("created_at ASC")
#things = Thing.search(params[:search])
end
def new
#thing = current_user.things.build
end
def create
#thing = current_user.things.build(thing_params)
if #thing.save
redirect_to #thing
else
render "new"
end
end
def profile
#things = Thing.where(user_id: current_user)
end
def show
end
def edit
end
def update
if #thing.update(thing_params)
redirect_to #thing
else
render "edit"
end
end
def destroy
if #thing.destroy
redirect_to root_path
else
redirect_to #thing
end
end
private
def thing_params
params.require(:thing).permit(:title, :description, :image).merge(zipcode: current_user.zipcode)
end
def find_thing
#thing = thing.find(params[:id])
end
def authenticate_user_first
if current_user != thing.find(params[:id]).user
redirect_to #thing
else
end
end
end
Can anyone help? Help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

There are two things that aren't connected to each other.
First, there is the deprecation warning. Because it is just a warning, not an error, you can choose to ignore it at the moment. If you want to remove the warning, just follow its instruction and change this line
if self.user.things(:reload).count >= 2
to
self.user.things.reload.count >= 2
Seconds, your code works like expected. Rails validations do not raise any errors, but they add error messages to the object. Just make sure that you display the errors to the user. To display the error you added to :base, add something like the following to your new.html.erb view:
<% if #thing.errors[:base].any? %>
<div class="error_message">
<%= #thing.errors.full_messages_for(:base).to_sentence %>
</div>
<% end %>