Rails not showing validation error messages

Question

HI guys, I am new to rails and just doing my first registration form. I have some validations that I want rails to check but for some reason it does not show the error messages.

On the views/user/signup.html.erb I have this

<h1>Register Now!</h1>
<% form_for :user, @u, :url => { :action => "signup" } do |f| %>
    <%= f.error_messages :header_message => "Please Try Again!", :message => "We had some problems processing your registration" %>
    <%= f.label(:first, "First Name")%>
    <%= f.text_field(:first) %><br/>
    <%= f.label(:last, "Last Name")%>
    <%= f.text_field(:last) %><br/>
    <%= f.label(:username, "Username")%>
    <%= f.text_field(:username) %><br/>
    <%= f.label(:password, "Password")%>
    <%= f.password_field(:password) %><br/>
    <%= f.label(:password_confirmation, "Confirm Password")%>
    <%= f.password_field(:password_confirmation) %><br/>
    <%= f.label(:email, "E-mail")%>
    <%= f.text_field(:email) %> <br/>
    <%= f.label(:terms_of_service, "I agree to the terms of service") %>
    <%= f.check_box(:terms_of_service) %><br/>
    <%= f.submit("Sign Up")%>
<% end %>

On the model I have the following

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  validates_length_of :username, :within =>4..15
  validates_length_of :password, :within => 3..520
  validates_presence_of :first, :last, :username, :email, :password, :password_confirmation
  validates_uniqueness_of :username, :email
  validates_confirmation_of :password
  validates_format_of :email, :with => /^([^@\s]+)@((?:[-a-z0-9]+\.)+[a-z]{2,})$/i, :message => "Invalid email"   
  validates_acceptance_of :terms_of_service, :message => "You must agree to our Terms of Service in order to create account"  
end

Controller

class UserController < ApplicationController
  def index
    @users = User.find(:all)
  end

  def signup
    if !params[:commit]
      render :action =>'signup'
    else
      @u = User.new
      @u.first = params[:first]
      @u.last = params[:last]
      @u.email = params[:email]
      @u.username = params[:username]
      @u.password = params[:password]
      @u.password_confirmation = params[:password_confirmation]
      @u.terms_of_service = params[:terms_of_service]
      if @u.valid?
        @u.password = Digest::SHA512.hexdigest(params[:password])
        @u.password_confirmation = Digest::SHA512.hexdigest(params[:password_confirmation])
        @u.save!
        render :action => 'success'
      else
        render :action => 'signup'
      end
    end
  end
end

Edit: I updated my code for some reason now I cannot create a user. it will give me errors. Anyone knows how to get around this?

Answer 1

Assuming you've named the User in question as @user in the controller change the form to

<% form_for :user, @user, :url => { :action => "signup" } do |f| %>

This might work as well

<% form_for @user, :url => { :action => "signup" } do |f| %>

Then in the form change accordingly:

<%= f.label(:first, "First Name")%>
<%= f.text_field :first %>

So add f. and remove _tag on each one.

And the errormessage part to:

<%= f.error_messages :header => "Please complete all the fields", :message => "There is a problem with one or more fields" %>

Not sure about how the :header and :message work in this last one, but I hope you get the idea.

UPDATEd the form tags, because they had a bug.

Answer 2

The problem could be that you are using redirect rather than render in your controller.

Error messages will not survive a redirect (a redirect causes your browser to immediately request a new page).

If you use render then the messages will not be lost.

Answer 3

Another issue may be the usage of rails 3 , which removed error_messages into a separate plugin.