Any nicer way to achieve this ? (habtm requiring at least on

Rails
1

Hi!

I have a QuestionResult, which has_and_belongs_to_many Answers and which
has
a custom validate to ensure there is at least one Answer associated.

As advertised on
http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/has_and_belongs_to_many , the
following test fails:

def test_not_working
question_result = QuestionResult.new(:question => @question,
:interview_result => @interview_result)
question_result.answers << @answer
question_result.save! # => throws RecordInvalid (at least one
answer is required)
end

The save! fails because I should be saving question_result before adding
relationships through the << call (otherwise the id is not already
known).

My current solution is to bypass the validations using save(false), then
add
the answers, then call save!, and wrap all the code with a begin/rescue
to
remove the question_result when RecordInvalid is thrown (I could also
use a
transaction for the job).

Is there any cleaner or shorter way to achieve this ?

thanks!

Thibaut

2

Thibaut Barrère wrote:

question_result.answers << @answer

(I could also use a transaction for the job).

Is there any cleaner or shorter way to achieve this ?

Can you post your validation code?

–
We develop, watch us RoR, in numbers too big to ignore.

3

Hi Mark

Can you post your validation code?

I found where the issue was, here’s a report:

def validate
errors.add(:answers,“At least one answer is required (#{answers.count}
actual)”) if (answers.count<1)
end

I can’t use count inside the validation step, because count equals size
only
once the model has been successfully saved.

Here’s a test to illustrate:

def test_working
question_result = QuestionResult.new(:question => @question,
:interview_result => @interview_result)
question_result.answers << @answer
assert_equal 0,question_result.answers.count
assert_equal 1,question_result.answers.size
question_result.save!
assert_equal 1,question_result.answers.count
assert_equal 1,question_result.answers.size
end

When using size inside the validations, everything runs smoothly.

thanks for your reply!

Thibaut