Question

My User model contains :name, :email, and :password fields. All 3 have validations for length. An “update account” web page allows the user to update his name and email address, but not password. When submitted, params[:user] is

{"name"=>"Joe User", "email"=>"[e-mail]"}

Note there is no “password” key because the form doesn’t contain such an input field.

When I call

@user.update_attributes(params[:user])

the password validation fails. However, since I’m not attempting to update the password, I don’t want the password validation to run on this update. I’m confused why the password validation is running when params[:user] doesn’t contain a “password” key.

Note that I want to have a separate web page elsewhere that allows the user to update his password. And for that submission, the password validation should run.

Thank you.

Answer 1

My application does something like this

attr_accessor :updating_password

validates_confirmation_of :password, :if => should_validate_password?

def should_validate_password?
  updating_password || new_record?
end

so you have to model.updating_password = true for the verification to take place, and you don’t have to do this on creation.

Which I found at a good railscast at http://railscasts.com/episodes/41-conditional-validations