Question

I have a basic invoice setup with models: Invoice, Item, LineItems.

# invoice.rb
class Invoice < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :line_items, :dependent => :destroy
  validates_presence_of :status

  before_save :default_values

  def default_values
    self.status = 'sent' unless self.status
  end
end

# item.rb
class Item < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :line_items
  validates_presence_of :name, :price
end

# line_item.rb
class LineItem < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :item
  belongs_to :invoice 
  before_save :default_values

  validates_presence_of :invoice_id
  validates :item_id, :presence => true
end

There is more in the model but I only presented the above for simplicity.

I get the following errors:

2 errors prohibited this invoice from being saved:
  Line items invoice can't be blank
  Status can't be blank

So two problems:

1. If I remove validates :invoice_id, :presence => true I don’t get the Line items invoice can't be blank error message anymore, but why? I do want to validate the invoice_id on line_items, ALL line_items are supposed to have an invoice_id. How can I validate the invoice_id on line_items without getting an error?

2. Why am I getting the Status can't be blank error if I set it as a default value? I can probably set it up on the invoices_controller but I think the default value should be set in the model, right? How can I validate the presence of status and still have a default value in the model for it?

Answer 1

Both of these validation errors are occurring because validations get called before save (and before the before_save callback).

I’m assuming that you’re using a nested_form to create the invoice and it’s line items at the same time. If this is the case, you don’t want to validates :invoice_id, :presence => true on the line items – the invoice and the line items are coming in at the same time, and the invoice hasn’t been saved yet, so it doesn’t have an id. If you leave the validation in, you’ll need to create and save an empty invoice first, and then create the line items later so the invoice_id is available. If you only want to make sure invoice_id is still set after any edits, you can enforce this via validates :invoice_id, :presence => true, :on => :update this will skip the validation when the line item is being created (and the invoice_id isn’t available yet).

You’re running into problems with validates :status, :presence => true for similar reasons – the values coming in via the request are being validated against, and the “status” value isn’t there. The before_save callback runs after validation. You can set the default value in the before_validation or after_initialization callback and the values will be there when validations are run.

Check out the Callbacks documentation for Rails for more info.