Validating an association

Rails
1

I have two models, A and B, related to one another by a many to many
association and I want to validate an object of model B as it’s being
added to the association based on both its own attributes and
attributes of the particular object of model A that it’s being
associated with.

I’ve realized that I can’t do this if the association is represented
by a habtm relationship since (as far as I can tell - please tell me
if I’m wrong) there’s no way to refer to the A object in my validation
method for B.

Has many :through looks like a better approach here, since I can
define the validation method on the join model itself. However this
raises a question. I can’t create a has many :through association
unless the objects on both ends of the association are already saved
(right?). But I don’t want B to be saved if the association is going
to be invalid.

Does this imply that the only way to handle this is to use a
transaction to wrap the saving of B and the creation of the
association? Or is there a smarter way to do this?

2

MarkMT wrote:

I have two models, A and B, related to one another by a many to many
association and I want to validate an object of model B as it’s being
added to the association based on both its own attributes and
attributes of the particular object of model A that it’s being
associated with.

I’ve realized that I can’t do this if the association is represented
by a habtm relationship since (as far as I can tell - please tell me
if I’m wrong) there’s no way to refer to the A object in my validation
method for B.

You could arrange to get access to the A object using something like:

class A < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many bs, :before_add => :set_b_current_a
def set_b_current_a(b) b.current_a = self end
end

class B < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many as
attr_accessor :current_a
end

–
We develop, watch us RoR, in numbers too big to ignore.

3

Thanks, that’s pretty interesting.

Mark.