CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrubyactiverecord
umar
umar

Reputation: 4389

how to customize rails activerecord validation error message to show attribute value

When a user tries to create a record with a name that already exists, I want to show an error message like:

name "some name" has already been taken

I have been trying to do:

validates_uniqueness_of :name, :message => "#{name} has already been taken"

but this outputs the table name instead of the value of the name attribute

Upvotes: 30

Views: 19201

Answers (3)

Sergio Kozlov
Sergio Kozlov

Reputation: 545

What version of Rails do you use?

If Rails 3. then as i understand you should use :message => '%{value} has already been taken'. I am not sure about Rails 2.3. - but in any case you can create your own custom validation that performs what you need.

Upvotes: 3

Austin Taylor
Austin Taylor

Reputation: 5477

2 things:

  1. The validation messages use the Rails I18n style interpolation, which is %{value}
  2. The key is value rather than name, because in the context of internationalization, you don't really care about the rest of the model.

So your code should be:

validates_uniqueness_of :name, :message => '%{value} has already been taken'

Upvotes: 46

Dylan Markow
Dylan Markow

Reputation: 124419

It looks like you can pass a Proc to the message. When you do this, you get two parameters:

  1. A symbol along the lines of :activerecord.errors.models.user.attributes.name.taken
  2. A hash that looks something like `{:model=>"User", :attribute=>"Name", :value=>"My Name"}

So if you allow for two parameters on a proc, you can use the attributes[:value] item to get the name that was used:

validates_uniqueness_of :name, 
                        :message => Proc.new { |error, attributes| 
                          "#{attributes[:value]} has already been taken." 
                        }

Upvotes: 26

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