Ruby on Rails: how to get error messages from a child resource displayed?
- by randombits
I'm having a difficult time understanding how to get Rails to show explicitly the error messages that a child resource is failing on when I render an XML template. Hypothetically, I have the following classes:
class School < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :students
validates_associated :students
end
class Student < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :school
validates_format_of :email,
:with => /^([^@\s]+)@((?:[-a-z0-9]+\.)+[a-z]{2,})$/i,
:message => "You must supply a valid email"
end
Now, in the controller, let's say we want to build a trivial API to allow us to add a new School with a student in it (again, I said, it's a terrible example, but plays its role for the purpose of the question)
class SchoolsController < ApplicationController
def create
@school = School.new
@student = school.students.build
@student.email = "bad@email"
respond_to do |format|
if @school.save
# some code
else
format.xml { render :xml => @school.errors, :status => :unprocessable_entity }
end
end
end
end
Now the validation is working just fine, things die because the email doesn't match the regex that's set in the validates_format_of method in the Student class. However the output I get is the following:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<errors>
<error>Students is invalid</error>
</errors>
I want the more meaningful error message that I set above with validates_format_of to show up. Meaning, I want it to say:
<error>You must supply a valid email</error>
What am I doing wrong for that not to show up?
