# Best practice to indicate exception/validation error?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/best-practice-to-indicate-exception-validation-error/148581>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [September 15, 2008, 9:40am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/best-practice-to-indicate-exception-validation-error/148581 "2008-09-15T09:40:42Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![arifb](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/3ec8ea/32.png) [@arifb](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/arifb)\
**Post date:** [September 15, 2008, 9:40am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/best-practice-to-indicate-exception-validation-error/148581/1 "2008-09-15T09:40:42Z")

</div>

Hi all,

Just getting familiar with rails and am performing some checks in a  
method within a controller. If the checks fail, I would like to  
indicate to the user a custom error message and stop the update (the  
method is updating a record in the model).

What are best practices to do this? I understand that for form  
validation I should be putting validation checks in the model however  
this is different in that the check is not against any one field in  
the model. Should I be raising an exception?

Ideally, I would like to indicate the error to the user in a similar  
fashion as when a form validation fails.

Thanks!

* * *

I apologize if this is a double post but I originally posted over 2  
hrs ago, and it has yet to appear.