Question

I have a model defined as follows :

 
var userTableConfig = {
    username: {
      type: Sequelize.STRING,
      allowNull: false,
      unique: true,
      validate: {
        len: [5, 30],
        is: ['[a-z0-9_]', 'i']
      }
    },
    email: {
      type: Sequelize.STRING,
      allowNull: false,
      unique: true,
      validate: {
        isEmail: true,
        len: [5, 30]
      }
    },
    ............. // Other fields
}

var userConfig =  userConfig = {
    underscored: true,
    instanceMethods: {
        ..............
    }
}

var User = seq.define('User', userTableConfig, userConfig);

Now when I use this model as follows :

    u = User.build();
    u.username = this.param('username');    // Contains empty string
    u.setPassword(this.param('password'));  // Contains empty string
    u.email = this.param('email');
    u.activation_state = 'pending';

    if (u.validate()) {
      console.log("Validation succeeded");
    } else {
      console.log("Validation failed");
      console.log(u.errors);
      .............
    }

Despite the length constraints not being met, the validator gladly succeeds and I see Validation succeeded in my console.

Taking it a step further, I could also push in arbitrary random characters which should not be validated by the regular expression constaints and the validator gladly accepts them as well.

So, I decided to check if the validators were at being run, and tried to check that using a custom validator:

  userTableConfig = {
    username: {
      type: Sequelize.STRING,
      allowNull: false,
      unique: true,
      validate: {
        randomValidator: function() {
          console.log("===========> validator executed");
          throw new Error('Hell with validation');
          return false;
        },
        len: [5, 30],
        is: ['[a-z0-9_]', 'i']
      }
    },
    ......
  }

What is ironical is that, the method randomValidator does get executed, and yet the validate method succeeds without throwing any error or returning false.

What is it that I am doing wrong and how should the above issue be rectified?

Answer 1

I figured out what the problem was :

The validate method does not return a boolean value indicating whether or not validation succeeded. Rather it returns an array of hashes matching fields to an array of errors thrown.

So instead of checking the truth value as :

if (u.validate()) {
      console.log("Validation succeeded");
    } else {
      console.log("Validation failed");
      console.log(u.errors);
      .............
    }

I should have checked the length of the array returned by u.validate().

Apart from this, what is quite counter-intuitive with Sequelize (esp. if you are coming from Rails) is that save does not perform implicit validation.