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text_field eating leading zero strings

#1610

Hi,

I have an issue where users must be able to set their postal code. We've set postal code to be a 5 length string. If we're using :

<%= form.text_field :postal_code, :size => 10 %>

The postal code is always displayed with leading zeros missing, even if the value is right in irb (user.postal_code => "02456" will be displayed "2456")

We changed our code to

<%= text_field_tag 'user[postal_code]', @user.postal_code, :size => 5, :maxlength => 5 %>

and now the leading zeros are there.

By the way, we had to override the method in user model to display the value correctly :

def postal_code
  read_attribute(:postal_code).to_s.rjust(5,"0")     
end

So, not sure if it's a real bug, or a ActionView nor ActiveRecord bug.

Thanks, Phil

Reported by Gravis · December 20th, 2008 @ 10:28 PM

State: invalid
Milestone: 2.x
Assigned to: nobody
Importance: none

Activity

  1. Frederick Cheung
    Frederick Cheung

    That's weird - I tried this on edge and 2.2.2 and it seem to work fine. What version of rails were you using.

    December 21st, 2008 @ 04:39 PM

  2. Gravis
    Gravis

    Hi,

    I'm using rails 2.2.2, and the site has been migrated several time from 1.X.

    The column type is a string, in schema.rb :

    t.string   "postal_code"

    and the problem occurs using sqlite and mysql.

    Thanks

    December 21st, 2008 @ 08:45 PM

  3. Gravis
    Gravis

    can't reproduce problem on a fresh 2.2.2 app.

    Okkkk, really sorry, my fault, the field was indeed an integer, and not a string (we have 2 postal codes there).

    We can close the ticket, and really sorry for the time spend :(

    December 21st, 2008 @ 11:36 PM

  4. Yehuda Katz (wycats)
    Yehuda Katz (wycats)
    • State changed from new to invalid

    Gravis: no need to apologize! Is there anything we can do in documentation to reduce the possibility of someone else experiencing this same issue?

    December 24th, 2008 @ 08:12 AM

  5. Gravis
    Gravis

    Thanks Yehuda !

    I think just a little paragraph in the guides explain that fields with possible leading zeros like postal codes, phone numbers, etc should be stored as string (with a :limit if possible). Also, It's generally a good idea to store this large "numbers" in a string field, since we generally don't do any calculation on them, nor number comparison ("postal code > value" ?). I'll try to add some lines in the rails guides regarding that.

    Thanks Gravis (hope this post won't re-open the ticket !)

    December 24th, 2008 @ 10:18 AM