Question

I’m trying to use Rails validations for a form text box to see if the text entered matches any existing values in a specific column of a table in the database. Is this possible with Rails?

Basically, like this:

User enters ‘Foobar’

Table column values: ‘Foobar,test,house,random’

Validation does not pass because ‘Foobar’ is already in the database.

Thanks!
dwmcc

Answer 1

You can do this in your model with something like validates_uniqueness_of :name or new in Rails 3 you can do multiple validations inline with validates :name, :presence => true, :uniqueness => true

From the Rails API.