Validation? Cool... How about before_save formatting

Rails
1

Hello,

I am trying to define a before_save method in an object. I would like
to call a function like sanitize or simple_format. These are view
functions. Is there any way, short of writing my own functions, to
sanitize a user’s text input BEFORE it is saved to the database rather
than after?

Thanks!

2

Mindtonic wrote:

The ActiveRecord Callbacks for before_save and before_create might help:
http://railsmanual.com/module/ActiveRecord::Callbacks

Cheers,
Mohit.
8/14/2007 | 10:49 PM.

3

Sweet…

What I am looking for are pre-existing methods that I can call from
within before_save that will serve the same function as sanitize or
simple_format.

4

http://snipplr.com/view/2505/use-helpers-in-controllers-or-models/

5

Thanks! That is exactly what I was looking for.

Singleton no less, very interesting!

I am of the philosophy that you should clean and format before you
store in the database and this is an excellent way to do it.

6

that snippet is actually a little more verbose than necessary but with
the benefit of namespacing the methods into help.xxx()

if you wanted you could simply require the ActionView helper module in
your application.rb:
include ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper

and that’s it… just call “sanitize(‘whatever’)” in your controllers
directly

7

I am of the philosophy that you should clean and format before you
store in the database and this is an excellent way to do it.

IMHO it is a gigantic deficiency of Rails that there is not an
out-of-the-box way to do this. h() is good but why filter output in 100
places when you can filter input once?

8

IMHO it is a gigantic deficiency of Rails that there is not an
out-of-the-box way to do this. h() is good but why filter output in 100
places when you can filter input once?
well, you can… exactly as described above or write your own
methods. IMHO it’s not rails’ place to do this automatically - you
might want to have those special characters in the db.