Rails Conditional Validations - ruby-on-rails

I am working on a project and need some help on where to begin. I have three pages
Update User
Create User
Admin User Password Change (like a Hard Reset Password for but only the admin can reset the user's password)
Change Password
On Create User first name, last name, username, password, and password confirmation are mandatory.
On Update User just first name, last name and username are mandatory.
On Admin User Password Change and Change Password, just password and password confirmation are mandatory.
How would you go about doing this? I don't think this is possible through models using validates_presence_of with an if because there are too many scenarios. Any help or guidance would be appreciated. Also, I am pretty new to Rails if you can't already tell.

You can pass conditionals to your validations:
validates :password, :confirmation => true, :presence => true
validates :first_name, :last_name, :username, :presence => true
validate :admin_user_password_change?
Of course you'd have to define what the admin_user_password_change? method would be to determine if it is an admin user changing a password.
UPDATE
The admin_user_password_change? method might be something like:
def admin_user_password_change?
unless self.admin? && self.password.present? && self.password_confirmation.present?
self.errors.add(:admin_password_change, "password and password_confirmation are required.")
end
end
As for How would it communicate with the controller?, it wouldn't directly. But if any of the conditions in the method are false (e.g. self.admin? && self.password.present? && self.password_confirmation.present?), an error will be added to the instance of User and the instance won't save in the controller.

Setting some fields to new values doesn't unset other fields; just because you're only updating some fields in one action doesn't mean the other fields will be unset, so long as they start in a consistent state.
Just add your validations. It will work fine.

You can tell to your validation work only on certain cenarios only using:
The create:
validates :first_name, :last_name, :username, presence: true, on: :create
The update:
validates :password, presence: true, on: :update
Take a look at on.
For validation based on context take a look at Context Validations

Related

Why password validation does not work after adding password recovery?

Faced a problem not clear to me.
I used password validation during registration.
def pass_val
if password_digest.count("a-z") <= 0 || password_digest.count("A-Z") <= 0
errors.add(:password, "must contain 1 small letter, 1 capital letter and minimum 8 symbols")
end
end
validates :password_digest, presence: true,
length: { minimum: 8 }
I made it possible to recover the password for the user, and validation just stopped working.
I changed all password_digest in validation to just password and validation worked again.
BUT, after that, password recovery disappeared, which began to curse for validation.
NoMethodError in PasswordResetsController#create
undefined method `count' for nil:NilClass
If I change all password again to password_digest, validation will disappear, but the recovery password will work again.
UPDATE
Using password - validation in the console works (it also works on the site. Passwords recovery does not work).
Using password_digest - validation in the console also works (it doesn’t work on the site, the recovery password works).
UPDATE 2
Moreover, an error occurs during password recovery when a letter is sent to the mail (before sending), and not exactly during the password change.
UPDATE 3
create method in PasswordResetsController:
def create
author = Author.find_by_email(params[:email])
author.send_password_reset if author
flash[:success] = "Email sent with password reset instructions."
redirect_to root_path
end
UPDATE 4
send password_reset:
def send_password_reset
confirmation_token
self.password_reset_sent_at = Time.zone.now
save!
AuthorMailer.password_reset(self).deliver!
end
But the letter is not sent, crashes up to this point.
I want to emphasize that I either use password_digest in validation and validation does not work, and password recovery works. Or I use password in validation and validation works, but password recovery does not.
Also, it’s worth noting that the create method in PasswordResetsController is not used to change the password, but to send an email to the email. I can’t understand why validation swears at him.
Seems like you already found a solution yourself. However I'm not sure you understand why this is happening.
Let's start of with the important fact that password_digest doesn't contain the password but rather a hashed version of the password. (The result of a hash function is also called a digest.) You'll want to add the validations to the password attribute, since that contains the actual password.
When you assign a new password to an author both the password and password digest will be assigned a new value. You could imagine the password setter to look something like this:
def password=(password)
#password = password
#password_digest = do_some_hash_magic(password)
end
Because password is set when you assign it to the author you're able to validate the contents of it.
Another important thing to know is that the actual password is never saved into the database, only the password digest is (for security reasons). For this reason when you (re)load the instance from the database password is set to nil, because the application no longer knows what it is.
Instead of skipping the validation with save(validate: false), I suggest using the :allow_nil option or making the validation conditional to only trigger the validation when the password is not nil.
validates :password, length: { in: 8..255 }, allow_nil: true
validates :password, format: { with: /\p{Lower}/, message: :no_lower }, allow_nil: true
validates :password, format: { with: /\p{Upper}/, message: :no_upper }, allow_nil: true
validates :password, format: { with: /\p{Digit}/, message: :no_digit }, allow_nil: true
validates :password, format: { with: /[\p{S}\p{P}]/, message: :no_special }, allow_nil: true
Alternatively you can be more explicit and use the :on option with a custom context to only trigger trigger the validations when you want them to:
validates :password, length: { in: 8..255 }, on: :password
validates :password, format: { with: /\p{Lower}/, message: :no_lower }, on: :password
validates :password, format: { with: /\p{Upper}/, message: :no_upper }, on: :password
validates :password, format: { with: /\p{Digit}/, message: :no_digit }, on: :password
validates :password, format: { with: /[\p{S}\p{P}]/, message: :no_special }, on: :password
The context doesn't have to be named after an attribute, using :foo instead of :password would also be just fine. You can then run these validations by passing a context when calling valid? or save.
author.valid?(:password)
author.save(context: :password)
If you use Rails 5 or higher you can pass multiple contexts as an array if you want to run a mix of validations. author.valid?([:create, :password])
For additional info about the regexes used check out the Ruby regexp documentation.
The error was in the send_password_reset method.
Added (: validate => false) to this method and it worked.
def send_password_reset
confirmation_token
self.password_reset_sent_at = Time.zone.now
save!(:validate => false)
AuthorMailer.password_reset(self).deliver!
end
In vallidation i use password.

Rails validation best practice

I have this validation for my user:
validates :password,
presence: true,
confirmation: true,
length: { minimum: 6 },
:on => :create
This is obvious. When I'm creating (registering) a new user, I want to fill up their password hence that's why presence: true.
Case 1) When the user wants to update his account (lets say change his username), the form has only the email and username fields. That's ok and the validation is ok.
Case 2) He forgot his password and I send him his "forgotten password link" and he is on the page where he is creating his new password. The form has these two fields: password and password confirmation. However, he leaves both of these fields empty and submits the form. The validation passes because it's only :on => create! because of case 1)
I can not add :on => update because the case 1) wouldn't pass, because there is no password field.
What should I do in this situation? What is the best practice or what is the real word solution to this "problem"?
What I have done for this situation is instead of using on: :create, I use a virtual attribute that I set only when setting/changing the password. Something like this:
validates :password, if: :changing_password?
attr_accessor :password_scenario
def changing_password?
self.password_scenario.present?
end
Then in your controller, you would simply set password_scenario to true whenever you are requiring password to be present.

Disabling validation in a particular case

In my User model I set validations for the password and its confirmation:
validates_presence_of :password, :password_confirmation
I use this for the forms. These attributes are not stored in the database, I am using the authlogic gem.
Now I am trying to make a system to restore forgotten passwords via email. The user inputs his email and the object is retrieved like this:
#user = User.find_by_email(params[:email])
Then, at a certain point in the process the value of a User attribute is set to true meaning that the user forgot his password, so I need to do a #user.save.
And there's the problem. Since password and password_confirmation were never stored, their values are nil. However, the validations come in play and prevent the user from being updated.
Is there any way to skip those particular validations so I can make this work? Or should I do something else? Any help?
You can skip all validations with save(validate: false). You can skip individual validations with the :if or :unless option, for example.
validates_presence_of :password, :password_confirmation, unless: :forgot_password?
def forgot_password?
# return true if the user is in the forgot password process
end
change
validates_presence_of :password, :password_confirmation
to
Assuming your field that is set to true is forgot_password
validates_presence_of :password, :password_confirmation, :unless => Proc.new { |a| a.forgot_password? }
Conditional Validations documentation

rails 3.1 partial_updates doesn't seem to work with password

i have a user model with a password attribute, which gets saved as password_digest.
What i want to do is have the edit user page and the edit password page separated, so that
the admin doesn't need to input the password everytime he needs to change something else. For this i have made an extra action / view.
My problem is that when i update the user info, i get password validation errors even though
i have no password field in the form. Which leads me to the conclusion that partial_updates isn't working with the password attribute (as i have already tested in the console that it is enabled, and it is)
Is this me doing something wrong, or should i approach this differently?
Similar to the railscasts approach mentioned by #normalocity, but without the need to set a pseudo-attribute in the controller, we do this (which is essentially taken from restful_authentication):
attr_accessor :password
validates :password,
:length => { :minimum => 8 },
:confirmation => true,
:presence => true,
:if => :password_required?
def password_required?
password_digest.blank? || !password.blank?
end
Basically, we assume that if the password_digest hasn't been set yet (for a new record), or if the password pseudo-attribute has been set, then that means the password is being changed and the validations have to be run. So we don't need to set a updating_password pseudo-attribute like they do in the railscasts episode.
You need to validate the password only if it's being changed. If it's not being changed, then the validation for the password field should be skipped.
Railscasts.com episode #41 shows you how to do this.

In Rails 3, how can I skip validation of the password field when I'm not attempting to update the password?

My User model contains :name, :email, and :password fields. All 3 have validations for length. An "update account" web page allows the user to update his name and email address, but not password. When submitted, params[:user] is
{"name"=>"Joe User", "email"=>"user#example.com"}
Note there is no "password" key because the form doesn't contain such an input field.
When I call
#user.update_attributes(params[:user])
the password validation fails. However, since I'm not attempting to update the password, I don't want the password validation to run on this update. I'm confused why the password validation is running when params[:user] doesn't contain a "password" key.
Note that I want to have a separate web page elsewhere that allows the user to update his password. And for that submission, the password validation should run.
Thank you.
My application does something like this
attr_accessor :updating_password
validates_confirmation_of :password, :if => should_validate_password?
def should_validate_password?
updating_password || new_record?
end
so you have to model.updating_password = true for the verification to take place, and you don't have to do this on creation.
Which I found at a good railscast at http://railscasts.com/episodes/41-conditional-validations
In your user model, you could just ignore the password validation if it's not set.
validates_length_of :password, :minimum => N, :unless => lambda {|u| u.password.nil? }
Using update_attributes will not change the value of the password if there is no key for it in the params hash.
Validation doesn't run against the changed fields only. It validates existing values too.
Your validation must be failing because the password field contains some invalid content that's already saved in the database. I'm guessing it's probably because you're hashing it after validation and you're trying to validate the hashed string.
You can use a virtual attribute (an instance variable or method) that you validate with a custom method, and then assign the hash to the stored password field. Have a look at this technique for ideas.
An app that I am working on uses the following:
validates_confirmation_of :password,
:if => Proc.new { |account|
!account.password.blank?
|| !account.password_confirmation.blank?
|| account.new_record? }
Depending on your requirements, you might want to remove the new_record? check
When password is added then only confirmation will be called and presence will call on create action only
**validates_presence_of :password, :on =>:create**
**validates_confirmation_of :password**

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