Validations in any class

By Mislav on 31 Aug 2008 in rails

Sometimes you don’t need database persistence for your models. Ryan Bates describes this as the non-ActiveRecord model in his screencasts.

What if you need validations? I’ve tried it, thinking that I only need to mix-in ActiveRecord::Validations module:

class Person
  attr_accessor :name, :age
  include ActiveRecord::Validations
  validates_presence_of :name
end

It turned out this doesn’t work. The Validations module expects our class to look like an ActiveRecord::Base subclass—at least to some extent. But, with a few methods more, we can easily make this happen.

The working code

At include time, the Validations module of Rails 2.1 expects these methods to be defined:
save, save!, update_attribute and new_record?.

Here is the code for a minimal model that uses validations:

class Person
  attr_accessor :name, :age

  def initialize(attrs = {})
    for key, value in attrs
      update_attribute(key, value)
    end
    @new_record = true
  end

  def save
    # your saving logic goes here
    # ...
    @new_record = false
    return true # if saving was a success
  end

  alias :save! :save

  def update_attribute(key, value)
    send "#{key}=", value
  end

  def new_record?() @new_record; end

  # the fun part:
  include ActiveRecord::Validations
  validates_presence_of :name
end

This class definition doesn’t raise errors. Let’s try it out:

>> me = Person.new :age => 24
=> #<Person:0x212f5a0 @new_record=true, @age=23>
>> me.save
=> false

Success! Validations refused to save the instance because the name attribute is missing:

>> me.name = "Mislav"
=> "Mislav"
>> me.save
=> true
>> me.new_record?
=> false

Of course, we can inspect the validation error messages in a way identical to doing it in ActiveRecord. Your custom view helpers for displaying validation errors should continue working without modifications.