Typecasting causes unexpected behavior

[drock]

Typecasting of values as they are set was added with #9 . This is causing my models to behave in a manner different than a normal ActiveRecord model attributes. Particularly, when passing in a string to an hstore attribute with the :integer type, a non-numerical string gets cast to 0. I would expect the model to accept the value and then my numericality validator to report the error when calling valid?

Example:

class MyModel < ActiveRecord::Base
    hstore_accesor :data, :number => :integer

    validates :number, numericality: { only_integer: true }
end

m = MyModel.new :number => 'lkj'
m.valid? #returns true
m.number #returns 0

In my opinion, this is causing the model to make an assumption about the input it should not be. This is particularly true when passing data in from a params hash from a form.

m.update_attributes params[:my_model]

The model should not be assuming that the user who submitted the form meant to put zero instead of lkj. This forces me as a developer to put this validation logic in the controller before being passed to the model but that is not the best place for such logic.

[devmyndstatus]

Derek,

Thanks for raising this, I agree it's probably better for this not to result in a zero. That said, I do think it's reasonable for the hstore_accessor to handle the type casting. I think there are two fixes we should do here:

1) Try to find a way to run the type casting on a setter after the validation stage runs, this gives users a chance to catch issues with normal AR validation.

2) Instead of casting to defaults, as in the case of a non-numeric string casting to zero, we should probably just raise an error when a bad cast would occur.

Thanks, // JC Grubbs | DevMynd http://devmynd.com

On Mar 28, 2014, at 9:30 AM, Derek Gallo notifications@github.com wrote:

Typecasting of values as they are set was added with #9 . This is causing my models to behave in a manner different than a normal ActiveRecord model attributes. Particularly, when passing in a string to an hstore attribute with the :integer type, a non-numerical string gets cast to 0. I would expect the model to accept the value and then my numericality validator to report the error when calling valid?

Example:

class MyModel < ActiveRecord::Base hstore_accesor :data, :number => :integer

validates :number, numericality: { only_integer: true }

end

m = MyModel.new :number => 'lkj' m.valid? #returns true m.number #returns 0 In my opinion, this is causing the model to make an assumption about the input it should not be. This is particularly true when passing data in from a params hash from a form.

m.update_attributes params[:my_model] The model should not be assuming that the user who submitted the form meant to put zero instead of lkj. This forces me as a developer to put this validation logic in the controller before being passed to the model but that is not the best place for such logic.

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[drock]

After messing around with a standard ActiveRecord model some more, I retract this issue. This is in fact exhibiting the same behavior as a standard ActiveRecord model. If you have a model with an attribute that maps to an integer column in the database and you try to set it to a string, it will in fact be set as a zero.