Question

i have a user model with a password attribute, which gets saved as password_digest.
What i want to do is have the edit user page and the edit password page separated, so that
the admin doesn’t need to input the password everytime he needs to change something else. For this i have made an extra action / view.

My problem is that when i update the user info, i get password validation errors even though
i have no password field in the form. Which leads me to the conclusion that partial_updates isn’t working with the password attribute (as i have already tested in the console that it is enabled, and it is)

Is this me doing something wrong, or should i approach this differently?

Answer 1

Similar to the railscasts approach mentioned by @normalocity, but without the need to set a pseudo-attribute in the controller, we do this (which is essentially taken from restful_authentication):

attr_accessor :password

validates :password,
          :length => { :minimum => 8 },
          :confirmation => true,
          :presence => true,
          :if => :password_required?

def password_required?
  password_digest.blank? || !password.blank?
end

Basically, we assume that if the password_digest hasn’t been set yet (for a new record), or if the password pseudo-attribute has been set, then that means the password is being changed and the validations have to be run. So we don’t need to set a updating_password pseudo-attribute like they do in the railscasts episode.