Question

I am building a simple Ruby on Rails app for problem management. I have a problem model as follows:

class Problem < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_accessible :active, :impact, :incident_number, :issue_description, :root_cause, :user_id, :problem_summary, :incident_priority, :timeline_enabled
  attr_accessor :enable_timeline

  validates :problem_summary, :length => { :in => 10..100 }

  belongs_to :user
  has_one :timeline
  has_many :actionitems

end

which has a has_many belongs_to association with the model for actionitems:

class Actionitem < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_accessible :completion_date, :description, :initial_due_date, :notes, :problem_id, :revised_due_date, :status, :user_id

  belongs_to :problem
end

I would like to be able to update the problem record and save it with some set of limited validations (I still need to add those). However, I would like to have a “Complete problem investigation” button that would trigger a method on the problem controller to set the :active attribute on the problem record to false. I would like to be able to run a different, more complete set of validations on the problem record prior to performing this action and also to validate that all actionitems (if any) that were associated with this problem record are in :status “completed”.

The two questions that I have:

1. How do I perform a specific set of validations only on a given action?
2. How can I validate that related instances of Actionitem are in status “complete” prior to performing an action on Problem?

This task seems very complex to me. If you could please point me to what I need to utilize in order to be able to achieve this that would be greatly appreciated! (I read on validates :on => :save etc and accepts_nested_attributes_for but I am not sure how to put all of this together to achieve the behavior that I want).

Many thanks for all your help!

Answer 1

try this

validates_length_of :problem_summary, :in => 10..100, :if => :status_active?

def status_active?
  self.active == true  
end

see in details – validations & validates_length_of