Validations

I started learning web development with Sinatra, which so far has satisfied my needs and has gotten the job done, but I think I’m starting to experience it’s limitations.

I’m in the process of learning Rails and I learned how to apply validation to forms. If you don’t know what validation are, they are basically a way to ensure that the data in a form you are submitting meets certain criteria. For example in a registration form you have an email address, username, password, password confirmation etc. and you want to make sure that a user doesn’t sign up with a username that is already taken.

When I made my registration form for networkcraft.net I hacked together my own validation, but Rails or I guess Active Record makes validation much easier. Here is an example of what I’m talking about:

validates :content, :length => { :maximum => 140 }

This limits the content field of a form to 140 characters and if you do exceed the limit it will fire off a flash error message, which is way better than having to do this manually. I’m sure there is a way to do validations in Sinatra, but I feel like Rails was designed for this.

Here are a couple of other links about validations in Rails: Active Record Validations Callbacks and Validations in Rails 3.