How can I skip a specific model validation when importing data?
For example, suppose I have this model:
class Account
validates :street_address, presence: true
end
Normally, I don't want accounts to be saved without addresses, but I'm also going to convert a lot of data from an old system, and many accounts there don't have addresses.
My goal is that I can add the old accounts to the new database, but in the future, when these accounts are edited, a street address will have to be added.
Clarification
As I said, I want to skip a specific validation; others should still run. For example, an account without an account number shouldn't be loaded into the new system at all.
This should work:
class Account
attr_accessor :importing
validates :street_address, presence: true,
unless: Proc.new { |account| account.importing }
end
old_system_accounts.each do |account|
# In the conversion script...
new_account = Account.new
new_account.importing = true # So it knows to ignore that validation
# ... load data from old system
new_account.save!
end
If you're only going to do the conversion one time (i.e, after importing the old data you won't need to do this again), you could just skip validations when you save the imported records instead of modifying your app to support it.
new_account.save validate: false
note that
account.update_attribute(:street_address, new_address)
will skip validations as well. #update_attributes (notice the 's') run validations, where update_attribute (singular) does not.
Related
We have user records that have an attribute called first_name. Many of these records do no have the first_name attribute filled out and thus it equals nil. We want to introduce a presence validation on this attribute. However we've come across a huge problem. If a user updates their record during any request, that request will fail. This leads to a rather abrasive error that we don't know how to handle.
One solution is to only call the validation when the user is creating a record. This works great but we want to enforce this validation when they are on the profile page and they are attempting to update their profile.
Is there a better way to handle this where we can enforce first name requirements on the update page yet still allow users to update their record without ?
Introducing validations on existing data that does not satisfy the new requirements can be problematic. This concept you're after is fundamentally migration-on-write: You've introduce a data migration that happens over time as records are written to, because the migration cannot occur without individual user input. This is one technique for migrating very large data set in zero-downtime environments, or for forcing password resets on users.
Fundamentally, you need to define the conditions in which validation must happen and find a way to test records (on create or update) for that condition. Your condition should select all new records, plus the records being updated in the context where migration is possible.
Once you've defined the condition, you can modify your validation thusly:
validates :first_name, presence: true, if: -> { condition_for_migration }
Ideally the condition should be some field or combination of fields already present in your table that correctly identifies records as ready to be migrated, but this isn't always possible.
Failing that, you could introduce a field specifically for this purpose. You might call it version_number, set all existing records to 1, and then make the default for all new records 2. Your migration might look like this:
# All existing records will have their `version_number` set to the default of 1
add_column :users, :version_number: :integer, null: false, default: 1
# Change the default to 2 for any records created after this point
change_column_default :users, :version_number, 2
You can then use version_number to tell whether validation should take place:
validates :first_name, presence: true, if: -> { version_number >= 2 }
The key is to make sure that, in the context of your profile form, you also update version_number to enable the validation of first_name:
# app/viws/users/edit.html.haml
= form_for #user do |f|
= f.hidden_field :version, value: 2
= f.input :first_name
In the absence of a real database field for this purpose, you can add a temporary one to your model, which maintains the context only for the lifetime of a particular model instance:
Add an accessor to your model, ie update_from_profile_page
Include that field in the contexts in which you want to require validation
Validate first_name during the creation of any new record
Validate first_name during any update where update_from_profile_page is true
For example:
app/models/user.rb
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
attr_accessor :update_from_profile_page
validates :first_name, presence: true, on: :create
validates :first_name, presence: true, on: :update, if: -> { update_from_profile_page }
end
app/views/user/edit.html.haml (your profile page)
= form_for #user do |f|
= f.input :first_name
app/controllers/users_controller.rb
def update
#user = User.find(params[:id])
#user = update_from_profile_page = true
#user.update(params.require(:user).permit(:first_name)
end
This is less desirable than finding a concrete business-logic-based reason for conditional validation as it involves introducing a virtual field to your model that has no functional value outside of a single specific case of a form submission.
I have a Company model and an Employer model. Employer belongs_to :company and Company has_many :employers. Within my Employer model I have the following validation:
validates :company_id, inclusion: {in: Company.pluck(:id).prepend(nil)}
I'm running into a problem where the above validation fails. Here is an example setup in a controller action that will cause the validation to fail:
company = Company.new(company_params)
# company_params contains nested attributes for employers
company.employers.each do |employer|
employer.password = SecureRandom.hex
end
company.employers.first.role = 'Admin' if client.employers.count == 1
company.save!
admin = company.employers.where(role: 'Admin').order(created_at: :asc).last
admin.update(some_attr: 'some_val')
On the last line in the example code snippet, admin.update will fail because the validation is checking to see if company_id is included in the list, which it is not, since the list was generated before company was saved.
Obviously there are ways around this such as grabbing the value of company.id and then using it to define admin later, but that seems like a roundabout solution. What I'd like to know is if there is a better way to solve this problem.
Update
Apparently the possible workaround I suggested doesn't even work.
new_company = Company.find(company.id)
admin = new_company.employers.where(role: 'Admin').order(created_at: :asc).last
admin.update
# Fails validation as before
I'm not sure I understand your question completely, but there is an issue in this part of the code:
validates :company_id, inclusion: {in: Company.pluck(:id).prepend(nil)}
The validation is configured on the class-level, so it won't work well with updates on that model (won't be re-evaluated on subsequent validations).
The docs state that you can use a block for inclusion in, so you could try to do that as well:
validates :company_id, inclusion: {in: ->() { Company.pluck(:id).prepend(nil) }}
Some people would recommend that you not even do this validation, but instead, have a database constraint on that column.
I believe you are misusing the inclusion validator here. If you want to validate that an associated model exists, instead of its id column having a value, you can do this in two ways. In ActivRecord, you can use a presence validator.
validates :company, presence: true
You should also use a foreign key constraint on the database level. This prevents a model from being saved if there is no corresponding record in the associated table.
add_foreign_key :employers, :companies
If it gets past ActiveRecord, the database will throw an error if there is no company record with the given company_id.
So I'm working on the registration aspect of the site currently. I have a main sign up which is just full name, email and password. (aka new.html.erb)
After you fill in that information I direct you to a new site (setup.html.erb) and ask for more info like city, country etc.
On that you also have the edit profile account.
I am trying to make my app more secure and adding restrictions and presence etc in the model. However how can I limit them.
Currently if I do
validates :email, presence: true,
and I go to a form that doesn't even contain the email for nor permits it I get an error up that I need to add an email.
Also how do I fix this: I make presence true, I input require in html5. But still if I go to my source code and just remove the form and push submit it saves and I can bypass adding info.
Currently if I do validates :email, presence: true,
and I go to a form that doesn't even contain the email for nor permits it I get an error up that I need to add an email.
Fix:
what you need is a conditional validation. If we look at rail guides it says
Sometimes it will make sense to validate an object only when a given predicate is satisfied. You can do that by using the :if and :unless options, which can take a symbol, a string, a Proc or an Array.
So in your model you could do something like:
class Order < ActiveRecord::Base
validates :email, presence: true, if: :need_to_validate?
def need_to_validate?
#your condition to check whether you want email validation or not
end
end
Update:
You can use params[:action] and params[:controller] smartly to check in which action and controller(hence which view) you currently are in so your method would be:
def need_to_validate?
params[:action] == your_view_action && params[:controller] == your_controller_name #your condition to check whether you want email validation or not
end
I have two separate forms for a profile picture and the rest of the profile information. Both forms, however, correspond to the profile model. For several of the profile attributes, I have validations like:
validates :title, presence: true
validates :zip_code, presence: true
The problem is that the validations are checked when someone tried to upload an image, which I don't want. That being said, I also have an image validator, so I don't want to avoid validation completely, just certain ones. I was thinking of trying to access the params hash in the model, but I can't figure out how and I'm pretty certain its a bad idea anyway. How can I make the right validation conditions? I already tried this:
validates :title, presence: true, :unless => :picture_exists?
def picture_exists?
if self.pic
puts 'yo pic exist'
return true
else
puts 'yo no pic'
return false
end
end
but it does not work because it checks whether or not the profile has a picture, not whether the params have a picture. So if someone had already saved a picture, they would be able to bypass the validations which I don't want. I want the validations to be bypassed when they are not using the picture submit form.
You can approach the issue in several ways:
1.- Skip all validations in your controller action (and validate manually, I guess)
save(validate: false) (source)
2.- Use a condition that you set manually before saving like this.
3.- Use a custom validation that stops all other validations from triggering if passes.
Maybe you can come up with more.
PS: Why would you expect your user to bypass the other validations before setting the profile picture?
GL & HF
I have a user object, he can update his profile which includes name, user_name, password (blank), password_confirmation (blank), email, email_confirmation (blank), bio and picture url.
My model states that all of the (blank) MUST be filled in. but if your admin and your just going to the users page to update the user's role - You as the admin should not have to fill in user data you obviously don't know.
So how does one get around this? should I instead create a list of users with a drop down beside them? is this not, essentially , a giant form? If so - how would this get created?
essentially: What's the best way to deal with this situation?
This is currently how users get updated
def update
#user = User.friendly.find(params[:id])
#user.update_attributes(user_update_params)
if #user.save
render :show
else
render :edit
end
end
private
def user_update_params
params.require(:user).permit(:name, :user_name, :email, :email_confirmation, :password,
:password_confirmation, :bio, :picture_url, :role)
end
The real problem seems to be that you have a logical error in your User model validations.
You seem to have a validation of the form,
validates :password, presence: true, confirmation: true
which is enforced EVERY TIME, i.e. a new password has to be selected every single time a user object is saved. But this is likely not what you want. You likely want this validation to only be enforced when the user is created for the first time, i.e. when it is a new record.
You can do this with,
validates :password, presence: true, confirmation: true, if: :new_record?
update_attribute
Updates the attribute without doing validations, you need this one.
check out this api doc
EDIT:
Speaking about reading documentation
Here is an abstract from the method documentation
update_attribute(name, value) public
Updates a single attribute and saves the record. This is especially
useful for boolean flags on existing records. Also note that
Validation is skipped.
Callbacks are invoked.
updated_at/updated_on column is updated if that column is available.
Updates all the attributes that are dirty in this object.
EDIT:
If you still need to validate with this method, note that it says that callbacks are invoked, so what you can do is write your own code to validate input and use callbacks as described here.