Question

I’m trying to apply a format validation to a model, but when I create the model it isn’t coming back as invalid. I added a length validation and it works just fine. What am I doing wrong?

require 'rubygems'
require 'active_record'

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  validates :username, :format => { :with => /[A-Za-z]+/, :message => "Only letters a-z are allowed" }
  validates :username, :length => { :maximum => 20, :too_long => "%{count} letters is too many"}
end  

ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection( ... )


user = User.create!(:username => 'johnsmith1234', :signupdate => '2010-11-12')
puts user.valid?

The output is always true unless I have a length of over 20 characters, then I get an error on the length. So why doesn’t the format validation fire?

Answer 1

/[A-Za-z]/ checks for one or more alphabets in given string. If you want only alphabets you need to specify ^ and $. (i.e) /^[A-Za-Z]$/

validates :username, :format => { :with => /^[A-Za-z]+$/, :message => "Only letters a-z are allowed" }

One more thing use new to create new user. Because create or create! will throw error if your validation fails.

user = User.new(:name => "john123")
if user.valid?
  #do something
else
  #do something          `user.errors.full_messages` will have your validation messages if it has error
end