Validating numericality of postgres integer field in rails 3

Question

my postgres database table was setup with

t.integer :time_employed

I had validations like so

validates :time_employed, numericality: true, allow_blank: true

and I also tried

validates_numericality_of :time_employed, allow_blank: true

But neither of them gave me the result I was looking for. I did some testing in the console and it seemed that the field was always being set to 0 or nil. If I input a string it was being set to 0.

I changed the database field to

t.string :time_employed

and now everything works like it should. It's not a huge problem, but I was hoping to keep the data correctly described by the schema.

I don't know much about databases yet, so this threw me for a loop. Can anyone explain what is happening here?

EDIT:

The problem was that it would allow blank entries, but it wouldn't throw an error if I input non numeric values. Anything would be validated as good, just not saved to the DB. After changing to t.string and no changes to the validations, it worked fine.

I also tried allow_nil: true but it had the same effect.

Sachin R · Accepted Answer · 2013-01-25 07:36:04Z

1

Replace this

validates_numericality_of :time_employed, allow_blank: true

by

validates_numericality_of :time_employed, allow_nil: true

allow_blank is not present in api docs this may be one of the reason.

answered Jan 25, 2013 at 7:36

Sachin R

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1 Comment

maneKozaroo Over a year ago

The question was edited. I tried allow_nil also but it had the same outcome. The weird thing was, with t.integer it wouldn't error with non numeric values. After I changed to t.string and no change to the model, everything worked fine.

kuboon · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-10 08:52:31Z

0

because your time_employed column is type-casted before validation.

validates_numericality_of :time_employed_before_type_cast, allow_blank: true

should work.

answered Sep 10, 2014 at 8:52

kuboon

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