Question

I have a model that takes an email address, but I do not want to require it for instance creation. I tried the following:

validates :email, :presence => false, :format => { :with => email_regex }

But this fails my test suite, the format regex apparently makes the presence of the email attribute required.

I thought it might be possible with a before_save method: is it possible to reject saving the object in a before_save method? Is there a better, “Rails way” of doing this?

Answer 1

You can use :allow_blank (or :allow_nil):

validates :email, :allow_blank => true, :format => { :with => email_regex }