In a Rails model I have an attribute is_subscriber
, when I constructed a db migration to add this column to the database I specified the default value to be false:
t.boolean "is_subscriber", :default => false
I also specified in the model that this attribute needs to be present:
validates :is_subscriber, presence: true
So why do I get this error when I create a model instance without specifying this attribute?
2012-05-08T21:05:54+00:00 app[web.1]: ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid (Validation failed: Is subscriber can't be blank):
From here
If you want to validate the presence of a boolean field (where the
real values are true and false), you will want to use
validates_inclusion_of :field_name, :in => [true, false] This is due
to the way Object#blank? handles boolean values. false.blank? # =>
true
Or in Rails3 way
validates :field, :inclusion => {:in => [true, false]}
I've solved this with:
validates_presence_of :is_subscriber, :if => 'is_subscriber.nil?'
I think it is neater to wrap this in a custom validator.
in /app/validators/is_boolean_validator.rb
class IsBooleanValidator < ActiveModel::EachValidator
def validate_each(record, attribute, parameters)
if !parameters.in? [true,false]
record.errors[attribute] << 'This must be true or false.'
end
end
end
then you have to make sure this is loaded by adding the following to /config/application.rb
config.autoload_paths += %W["#{config.root}/app/validators/"]
(don't forget to restart your server to load this)
You can then validate more neatly with
validates: :field1, field2, is_boolean: true