Handling Illegal Dates When User Enters Date

Rails
1

For my website when a user creates an account they have to fill out
their
birthdate using pulldown menus. If a user enters an illegal date the
system
throws an error before I even get the opportunity to validate the date
in
the user model on save.

Soon as I do the following in my controller:

@user = User.new(params[:user])

The following error is thrown:

1 error(s) on assignment of multiparameter attributes

How are people handling situations like this… what is the best
practice?
I don’t personaly want to do validation outside of the model… that
would
just suck :-p. Thanks for any input you might have!

Thanks :-).

–
John K.
[email protected]

Blog: http://www.kopanas.com
Conference: http://www.cusec.net
Twits: http://www.twitter.com/kopanas

2

Here’s what I’ve done:

begin
@user = User.new(params[:user])
rescue ActiveRecord::MultiparameterAssignmentErrors
# date is invalid, so reset these fields before creating new
user object
params[:user][‘date_of_birth(1i)’] = ‘’
params[:user][‘date_of_birth(2i)’] = ‘’
params[:user][‘date_of_birth(3i)’] = ‘’
# try again, letting our model’s
validates_presence_of :date_of_birth
# handle things.
@user = User.new(params[:user])
end

3

By the way, I neglected to mention the fact that this code goes in
your controller. Also, the formatting got messed up, but I think you
can still get the gist of it.

4

Your solution makes sense… but isn’t the problem with this that you
are
not adding an error onto your model’s error stack so a proper error is
not
being displayed? I am assuming their is more “Rails Way” of handling
this… no?

On Jan 29, 2008 11:16 PM, Pat N. [email protected] wrote:

rescue ActiveRecord::MultiparameterAssignmentErrors

Soon as I do the following in my controller:
would
Twits:http://www.twitter.com/kopanas

–
John K.
[email protected]

Blog: http://www.kopanas.com
Conference: http://www.cusec.net
Twits: http://www.twitter.com/kopanas

5

Good point. While it’s still controller centric, here’s another pass,
with a specific error on the date_of_birth field:

begin
@user = User.new(params[:user])
rescue ActiveRecord::MultiparameterAssignmentErrors

date is invalid, so reset these fields before creating new user

object
params[:user][‘date_of_birth(1i)’] = ‘’
params[:user][‘date_of_birth(2i)’] = ‘’
params[:user][‘date_of_birth(3i)’] = ‘’

try again, letting our model’s

validates_presence_of :date_of_birth

handle things.

@user = User.new(params[:user])

Adding a specific error:

@user.errors.add(:date_of_birth, “was invalid”)
end