How to make a text_area text required using Ruby Form helpers

Question

I have the following simple_form_for that sends an email using MailForm (does not store anything on a database)

  <div class="small-10 small-offset-1 medium-6 medium-offset-3 large-6 large-offset-3 columns">
    <%= simple_form_for @contact, :html => {:class => 'form-horizontal'} do |f| %>
        <%= f.label :Nombre %>
        <%= f.text_field :name, :required => true, :value => 'Administrador', :readonly => true %>
        <%= f.label :Correo_electrónico %>
        <%= f.email_field :email, :required => true, :value => @pass_email, :readonly => true %>
        <%= f.label :Mensaje %>
        <%= f.text_area :message, :as => :text, :required => true, cols: 20, rows: 10 %>
        <div class="hidden">
          <%= f.input :nickname, :hint => 'Leave this field blank!' %>
        </div>

        </br>
        <%= f.button :submit, 'Enviar', :class => "button [radius round]" %>
    <% end %>
    <%= button_to 'Volver', manager_admin_menu_path, :method => :get, :class => 'button success [radius round]' %>
  </div>

As you can see the text_area has a required => true but when I test the form it allows to submit empty text in the text_area

How can I validate with rails/ruby that any text was typed in the text_area (basically make the text_area it a required field, I know I can probably do this with javascript but want to learn the correct Ruby/Rails way)

UPDATE

My model inherits from MailForm and is defined like this

class Contact < MailForm::Base
  attribute :name,      :validate => true
  attribute :email,     :validate => /\A([\w\.%\+\-]+)@([\w\-]+\.)+([\w]{2,})\z/i
  attribute :message
  attribute :nickname,  :captcha  => true

end

I also want to understand why the required option is not behaving as expected

The texarea is being rendered like this

<textarea cols="20" id="contact_message" name="contact[message]" required="required" rows="10">
</textarea>

Apparently no white spaces but a linebreak is present, does this affect ?

check this, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17061436/textarea-required-is-not-working, it may be that a white space is in the text area. — Nafaa Boutefer, Feb 23 '15 at 18:13
@NafaaBoutefer I have updated my question with the rendered text area tag — Mauricio Gracia Gutierrez, Feb 23 '15 at 18:34

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 23 '15 at 17:26

That's the concept of validations in Rails. Validations mean that you make sure a field meets some requirements before saving it to the database, you can validate presence which will only submit the form if the the field is not empty, you can validate uniqueness which will only submit the form if the field is unique ( does not exist already in the database ), and so on.

So for your concern, you have a Contact model, in your contact.rb file you should add :

class Contact <  ActiveRecord::Base 
  validates :message, presence: true // add this line
end

Now when you submit the form with empty message field, it will complain and give you an error.

Read here for more into http://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_validations.html

It turns out that the model does not inherit from AcriveRecord but from MailForm `class Contact < MailForm::Base` since this is a form that sends an email — Mauricio Gracia Gutierrez, Feb 23 '15 at 17:44

How to make a text_area text required using Ruby Form helpers

1 Answers1