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DRY Validations for Similar Models

Sillico asked in Rails

In my app I have restaurants which have a name, address, state, zipcode, country, and some other stuff. These restaurants have many locations, and each location belongs to a restaurant. The locations also hold a name, address, state, zipcode, and country. I was wondering if there is a clean way of writing validations in their model files without having to repeat myself in each model file? Can validations go into a function?

Thanks.

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Definitely! You can probably do this cleanest by creating a Concern and putting the validations in there, then including the concern in both models. That's exactly the purpose they're designed for, so they should do exactly what you want.

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Just to provide an alternative solution - If you're still early in the development cycle and haven't gone to production yet, you could also create a contact model that stores all the address info, then you'd only have one model to manage validations:

#models/restraunt.rb
has_one :contact, as: :contactable, dependent: :destroy

#models/location.rb
has_one :contact, as: :contactable, dependent: :destroy

#models/contact.rb
belongs_to :contactable, polymorphic: true

then your migration could be something like:

class CreateContacts < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    create_table :contacts do |t|
      t.string :line_1
      t.string :line_2
      t.string :city
      t.integer :state, :default => 0
      t.string :zip
      t.string :email
      t.string :phone
      t.decimal :lat, :precision => 10, :scale => 6, :default => 0
      t.decimal :lng, :precision => 10, :scale => 6, :default => 0
      t.references :contactable, polymorphic: true, index: true

      t.timestamps null: false
    end
  end
end
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Thanks to both of you for the solutions! That worked well.

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In addition, here is the code I used for the solution Chris suggested, for anyone interested.

# /models/concerns/location_validations.rb
module LocationValidations
    extend ActiveSupport::Concern

    included do
        validates :name,    presence: true
        validates :address, presence: true
        validates :state,   presence: true
        validates :zipcode, presence: true
        validates :country, presence: true
    end
end
# models/restaurant.rb
class Restaurant < ApplicationRecord
    has_many :branches
    has_and_belongs_to_many :users
    validates :phone, presence: true
    validates :email, presence: true
    include LocationValidations
end
# models/branch.rb
class Branch < ApplicationRecord
    belongs_to :restaurant
    validates :restaurant_id, presence: true
    include LocationValidations
end
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