PROPOSAL: Validations as Mixin

Rails
1

It seems to me that Validations are quite useful for many objects, even
ones having nothing to do with ActiveRecord.

Common examples are Contact Us forms, multi-step forms, web service
paramater validations, etc.

I took a look at the source for Validations, and it seems that it is
very independent from ActiveRecord. I caught only three depenedencies:

  1. validates_numericy --> depends on ActiveRecords’ before_type_case
  2. The exceptions were from the ActiveRecord namespace
  3. Including Validations hooked on methods like save

It would seem to me that Validations would be best off as an independent
mixin. All ActiveRecord would need to do is mix it, add
validates_numericay (1), catch the exceptions and rethrow them as
ActiveRecord exceptions (2), and hook save type methods (3).

What does everyone say? Would this be a good change? Is there an
important reason for not doing this?

2

C’omon, someone has to either agree with this, or be able to say what’s
bad about it?

List R. wrote:

It seems to me that Validations are quite useful for many objects, even
ones having nothing to do with ActiveRecord.

Common examples are Contact Us forms, multi-step forms, web service
paramater validations, etc.

I took a look at the source for Validations, and it seems that it is
very independent from ActiveRecord. I caught only three depenedencies:

  1. validates_numericy --> depends on ActiveRecords’ before_type_case
  2. The exceptions were from the ActiveRecord namespace
  3. Including Validations hooked on methods like save

It would seem to me that Validations would be best off as an independent
mixin. All ActiveRecord would need to do is mix it, add
validates_numericay (1), catch the exceptions and rethrow them as
ActiveRecord exceptions (2), and hook save type methods (3).

What does everyone say? Would this be a good change? Is there an
important reason for not doing this?

3

On 1/16/06, List R. [email protected] wrote:

C’omon, someone has to either agree with this, or be able to say what’s
bad about it?

http://dev.rubyonrails.org/browser/trunk/activerecord/lib/active_record/validations.rb

It’s been like that for awhile now.

–
rick
http://techno-weenie.net

4

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5

What does everyone say? Would this be a good change? Is there an
important reason for not doing this?

I also think that this is a good idea and would be interested in hearing
if
anyone thinks it is not good. I would even go so far as to put
validations
in their own package. Perhaps ActiveValidations. Validations are
something
that a lot of applications can benefit from.

Saša Ebach

6

This would also be helpful for the folks talking about attempting to
specify the schema in
the model (the migrations/schema thread and the using Og in rails
thread).

b

7

This would be VERY usefull for a project I’m working on. I’ve cloned
the
interface to active record objects, and use a different data storage
scheme. Right now I’m on my own for data validation functionality. If
I
could mixin all the existing validation stuff, that would save a bunch
of
work.

I’m all for it.

matt