Flickr - Tutorial

Rails
1

So I’ve pretty much followed the steps in the video tutorial on RoR.com
for creating a small app, to search for photos on flickr.com - all is
good, and works as intended to…

How would I go about adding validation, so if no tags are specified it
will fail. I know I have to use validates_presence_of :tags - but not
in the controller… so I tried to generate a model called ‘search’
(the form name) and added the validates_presence_of :tags - but it is
still not working.

What am I doing wrong ?

Regards,

/mich

2

On 3/7/06, mich [email protected] wrote:

How would I go about adding validation, so if no tags are specified it
will fail. I know I have to use validates_presence_of :tags - but not in the
controller…

The “validates_*” methods are part of ActiveRecord, so they won’t work
in
the Flickr demo at all.

You could write your own method in the controller.

3

mich wrote:

In this case, you are not trying to save your information to a
database. This is a query, not a model. That means using the
validates… methods in ActiveRecord models is the wrong solution.

What you can do is to verify the information in the controller like
this:

@tags = params[:tags]
if @tags.is_empty?
flash[:notice] = “You must supply a tag”
redirect_to ‘search’
end

In short, you pull the tags out of the params array and perform your
checks there.

4

Berin L. wrote:

@tags = params[:tags]
if @tags.is_empty?
flash[:notice] = “You must supply a tag”
redirect_to ‘search’
end

Actually this is not working. is_empty is not a method - and by changing
it to @tags.empty? I still cannot get it to work.

/mich

5

On 3/7/06, mich [email protected] wrote:

Actually this is not working. is_empty is not a method - and by changing
it to @tags.empty? I still cannot get it to work.

The problem with the Flickr tutorial, is that it’s using an Ajax
response,
which waxes weirdly with redirect, in my experience.

Try this:

def search
flickr = Flickr.new ‘YOUR-API-KEY’
if (@params[:tags].empty?)
render (:text => “You must supply a tag to search for”)
else
render :partial => ‘photo’, :collection =>
flickr.photos(:tags=> params[:tags], :per_page => ‘24’)
end
end

6

Berin L. wrote:

In this case, you are not trying to save your information to a
database. This is a query, not a model. That means using the
validates… methods in ActiveRecord models is the wrong solution.

What you can do is to verify the information in the controller like
this:

@tags = params[:tags]
if @tags.is_empty?
flash[:notice] = “You must supply a tag”
redirect_to ‘search’
end

In short, you pull the tags out of the params array and perform your
checks there.

Make sense !
Thanks !

/mich

7

Joshua W. wrote:

Try this:

def search
flickr = Flickr.new ‘YOUR-API-KEY’
if (@params[:tags].empty?)
render (:text => “You must supply a tag to search for”)
else
render :partial => ‘photo’, :collection =>
flickr.photos(:tags=> params[:tags], :per_page => ‘24’)
end
end

Works like a charm !

Thanks.

/mich