Question

I’m new to rails and have a simple problem.

I have a rails model:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base

  attr_accessor :password
  attr_accessible :name, :email, :password, :password_confirmation, :description 

  email_regex = /\A[\w+\-.]+@[a-z\d\-.]+\.[a-z]+\z/i

  validates :email,    :presence => true

  validates :name,     :presence => true

  validates :password, :presence => true

  ...

end

On my update page for this model I have a form containing a textbox for email and a textbox for name.

in my controller I have the following update method:

def update
  @user = User.find(params[:id])

  respond_to do |format|
    if @user.update_attributes(:name => params[:name], :email => params[:email])
      flash[:success] = "Profile updated"
      format.html { redirect_to(@user, :notice => 'User was successfully updated.') }
      format.xml  { head :ok }
    else
      @title = "Edit user"
      format.html { render :action => "edit" }
      format.xml  { render :xml => @user.errors, :status => :unprocessable_entity }
    end
  end
end

This is failing with a strange error message:

undefined method `downcase' for nil:NilClass

Can anybody tell me where I am going wrong here? I’m sure I’m doing something daft, but cannot work out what it is…

Answer 1

You can trigger validation conditionally if you insert some kind of helper method. This is commonly the case for multi-stage entries, or partial updates:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  validates :password,
    :presence => { :if => :password_required? }

protected
  def password_required?
    self.new_record?
  end
end

I really do hope you’re not saving the password as plain-text. This is a huge liability. Usually password and password_confirmation are temporary attr_accessor methods that are later hashed and saved.