Lighthouse has a new layout. Prefer the old one? Return to the old layout, and switch back any time from the link at the top of each page.

This project is archived and is in readonly mode.

Allow dynamic lists with validates_inclusion_of :in

#6136

Suppose you have a validation rule such as this:
validates_inclusion_of :foo, :in => [1,2,3]

Currently, you can only pass a constant value to :in.

Suppose that the list of valid values changes. In that case, you have to resort to workarounds like this:

validate :validate_foo

def validate_foo
  unless my_foo_list.include?(foo)
    self.errors.add(:foo, I18n.t("activerecord.errors.models.bar.attributes.foo.inclusion"))
  end
end

And you have to write this for every attribute in every model. I suppose you could do some trickery to refactor this, but it's still a lot of extra code that's not very DRY.

It would be nice if you could pass a symbol to :in, and have that symbol evaluated.

validates_inclusion_of :foo, :in => :valid_foo_values_list

def valid_foo_values_list
 if things?
   [1,2,3]
 else
   [4,5,6]
 end
end

In lib/active_record/validations.rb, in validates_inclusion_of, we have this call
enum = configuration[:in] || configuration[:within]

A simple would be to add this line:
enum = self.send(enum) if enum.is_a?(Symbol)

However, I suspect there are other implications.

Reported by Paul Schreiber · December 8th, 2010 @ 10:42 PM

State: open
Milestone: none
Assigned to: nobody
Importance: none

Activity

  1. rails
    rails
    • State changed from new to open

    This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not been commented on for at least three months.

    The resources of the Rails core team are limited, and so we are asking for your help. If you can still reproduce this error on the 3-0-stable branch or on master, please reply with all of the information you have about it and add "[state:open]" to your comment. This will reopen the ticket for review. Likewise, if you feel that this is a very important feature for Rails to include, please reply with your explanation so we can consider it.

    Thank you for all your contributions, and we hope you will understand this step to focus our efforts where they are most helpful.

    March 9th, 2011 @ 12:00 AM

  2. rails
    rails
    • State changed from open to stale

    March 9th, 2011 @ 12:00 AM

  3. Paul Schreiber
    Paul Schreiber
    • State changed from stale to open

    [state:open].

    March 9th, 2011 @ 12:06 AM