Rails%203%20In%20Action

80 CHAPTER 3 Developing a real Rails application
The create! method, instead of nonchalantly handing back a Project object regardless
of any validations, raises an ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid exception if any of the
validations fail, showing the exception followed by a large stacktrace, which you can
safely ignore for now. You are notified which validation failed. To stop it from failing,
you must pass in a name attribute, and it will happily return a saved Project object:
irb(main):002:0> Project.create!(:name => "TextMate 2")
=> #
That’s how to use create to test it in the console, but in your ProjectsController,
you use the method shown in the following listing instead.
Listing 3.29 app/controllers/projects_controller.rb
@project = Project.new(params[:project])
@project.save
save doesn’t raise an exception if validations fail, as create! did, but instead returns
false. If the validations pass, save returns true. You can use this to your advantage to
show the user an error message when this returns false by using it in an if statement.
Make the create action in the ProjectsController, as in the following listing.
Listing 3.30 app/controllers/projects_controller.rb
def create
@project = Project.new(params[:project])
if @project.save
flash[:notice] = "Project has been created."
redirect_to @project
else
flash[:alert] = "Project has not been created."
render :action => "new"
end
end
Now if the @project object is valid, then save returns true and executes everything
between the if and the else. If it isn’t valid, then everything between the else and
the following end is executed. In the else, you specify a different key for the flash message
because you’ll want to style alert messages differently from notices later in the
application’s lifecycle.
When you run rake cucumber:ok here, the second step of your second scenario
passes because you now have the flash[:alert] set:
Then I should see "Project has not been created."
And I should see "Name can't be blank"
expected #has_content?("Name can't be blank")
to return true, got false
...
12 steps (1 failed, 11 passed)