Question

I have two fields in a form I would like to validate the presence of, before sending. The problem though is that the controller’s model doesn’t have these fields in the database, so I tried making virtual attributes. I’m not quite sure how to get it to work though.

I tried doing this in the Model, called “Find_number”

class FindNumber < ActiveRecord::Base

    attr_accessor :name
    attr_accessor :original_number

    validates :name, presence: true
    validates :original_number, presence: true

end

and the following in the create action of the Find_numbers controller

def create
    @user = current_user
    client = Twilio::REST::Client.new(@user.twilio_account_sid, @user.twilio_auth_token)

    search_params = {}
      %w[in_postal_code near_number contains].each do |p|
        search_params[p] = params[p] unless params[p].nil? || params[p].empty?
      end

    local_numbers = client.account.available_phone_numbers.get('US').local
    @numbers = local_numbers.list(search_params)

    if :name.valid? && :original_number.errors.any?
        unless @numbers.empty?
        render 'find_numbers/show'
        else
        flash.now[:error] = "Sorry, We Couldn't Find Any Numbers That Matched Your Search! Maybe Something Simpler?"    
        render 'find_numbers/new'
        end
    else
    flash.now[:error] = "Sorry, We Couldn't Find Any Numbers That Matched Your Search! Maybe Something Simpler?"    
    render 'find_numbers/new'   
    end     
end

When I enter info though, I get the error

undefined method `valid?' for :name:Symbol

I’m probably calling the :name and :original_number attributes incorrectly, and the double if then statements look very newbish :P.

What would I need to replace if :name.valid? && :original_number.errors.any? , to make sure that it validates? Or is there a lot more I’m missing?

Answer 1

I think you are confusing the boundary between ‘controller’ and ‘model’. The controller doesn’t know anything about the validations inside of the model that you’ve written. The fact that the controller is called FindNumbersController and the model is called FindNumber doesn’t really mean anything in terms of shared functionality.

You would need to explicitly create an instance of the model with the passed in params, and let the model perform the validation on the instance

find_number = FindNumber.new(params.slice(:name, :original_number))

Then you can ask whether the instance as a whole is valid

find_number.valid?

or whether a specific field has any error messages

find_number.errors[:field].any?

So, :name.valid? becomes find_number.errors[:name].empty? and :original_number.errors.any? becomes find_number.errors[:original_number].any?