Hi again, I have a problem when I try to validate uniqueness of data
entered through text fields in this particular circumstance.
Let say that I have a text field which has a validates_uniqueness_of
on its respective model.
And let say that the user enter for that field the value “Stanley
Kubrick” and it is saved without problems.
On the listing I will see the entered value “Stanley Kubrick”, as it
was supposed to be.
Then I use the same form to enter the value "Stanley Kubrick " (with a
blank space at the end) and, obviously, validation will let it pass.
The problem begins when the user will see on the listing two
“apparently” duplicated records like this:
- Stanley Kubrick
- Stanley Kubrick
What I need is a short way to remove those leading blank spaces before
the validation that doesn’t push me to change a hundred of models in
my applications.
Peace!!
On Sep 23, 3:18 am, “paco.onrails” [email protected] wrote:
Then I use the same form to enter the value "Stanley Kubrick " (with a
Peace!!
Try this:
class Person
before_validation :strip_blanks
protected
def strip_blanks
self.name = self.name.strip
end
end
before_validation :strip_white_space
def strip_white_space
self…
Although this is a reasonably clean and straight forward solution, is
there a compelling reason that Rails itself doesn’t trim leading and
trailing whitespace from text fields? It seems to me that would be a
reasonable “intelligent” default. How often would you want to preserve
the leading and trailing whitespace entered by a user?
Wouldn’t it make sense instead to have a way of overriding the trimming
only when necessary? Anyway, just some thoughts.
This is one of two things that I personally wish was done differently in
Rails form processing. The second is that I would prefer that fields
containing nothing (or whitespace only) were interpreted as nil rather
than an empty string. I don’t like having empty strings in my database
where I would expect the value to be NULL. However, I realize that
others may not agree with me on this one, so maybe have an application
wide configuration setting to tell Rails how to interpret empty text
fields.
I suppose there might also be a way to implement this type of behavior
in a before_filter of the application controller. I’ll have to do some
experimenting with that…
Erol F. wrote:
On Sep 23, 3:18�am, “paco.onrails” [email protected] wrote:
Then I use the same form to enter the value "Stanley Kubrick " (with a
Peace!!
Try this:
class Person
before_validation :strip_blanks
protected
def strip_blanks
self.name = self.name.strip
end
end
In short, I would
leave the post processing of input to the methods that are tasked to do
it.
I’m sure you’re right. I was just sorting of thinking out loud, fishing
for other people’s opinions.
It just seemed to me that some basic pre-processing of user input by the
Rails subsystem could alleviate having to handle these issues on a
nearly-every-case basis.
I can’t think of too many cases where I would want to preserve the
leading and trailing whitespace from a text field. So I’d rather have to
add some extra code in order to preserve whitespace, rather than adding
code to practically every model to ensure I’m getting them trimmed.
I think it would be actually be nice if accessing something like
params[:some_value] for :some_value to be trimmed of leading and
trailing whitespace unless told otherwise.
Conrad T. wrote:
On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 6:06 AM, Robert W. <
[email protected]> wrote:
This is one of two things that I personally wish was done differently in
experimenting with that…
You have a good idea but I don’t think that you want to start modifying
the
standard functionality of Rails helpers that are to mirror the standard
HTML
tags.
Also, it seems that you have written more in your argument to add
trimming
to the
text field tag than it took to actually write the ruby code to do it.
In short, I would
leave the post processing of input to the methods that are tasked to do
it.
-Conrad
On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 6:06 AM, Robert W. <
[email protected]> wrote:
This is one of two things that I personally wish was done differently in
experimenting with that…
You have a good idea but I don’t think that you want to start modifying
the
standard functionality of Rails helpers that are to mirror the standard
HTML
tags.
Also, it seems that you have written more in your argument to add
trimming
to the
text field tag than it took to actually write the ruby code to do it.
In short, I would
leave the post processing of input to the methods that are tasked to do
it.
-Conrad
On Sep 23, 11:33 pm, Robert W. [email protected]
wrote:
code to practically every model to ensure I’m getting them trimmed.
I think it would be actually be nice if accessing something like
params[:some_value] for :some_value to be trimmed of leading and
trailing whitespace unless told otherwise.
Rails is probably just following the principle of least astonishment.
Most devs, or atleast those I know of, still expects user input to be
saved as is.