Question

I am working with a form having 2 checkboxes: option_one and option_two.

I don’t want to allow submission of the form if option_two is checked and option_one is not.

In other words if somebody checks option_two, they must check option_one as well.

So in my MyModel I wrote :

validates :option_one, :presence => true, :if => option_two_active?, :message => "Dummy message."

Then in the MyController, I added :

def option_two_active?
    params[:option_two] == "1"
end 

But it keeps giving me the following error :

NoMethodError in MyController#index

Is my approach correct ? How can I achieve this ? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You have to specify the conditional method with a symbol:

validates :option_one, :presence => true, :if => :option_two_active?, :message => "Dummy message."

Also, you since you can’t use params from a model, you should assign that value to the model from the controller, either with create, update_attributes, or manually. If you want to persist the option_two field, then it should be a database column, else you can just create an attribute accessor:

attribute_accessor :option_two