wwwestin / phase-4-controller-validations-lab

Controller Validations Lab

Learning Goals

• Check the validity of a model in a controller
• Render a response with the error messages
• Use HTTP status codes to provide additional context

Introduction

Time to apply these new tools!

The goal of this lab is to allow users of this blog-style application to create and edit authors and posts without worrying about typos or other mistakes leading to error-prone form submissions.

For example, if someone creates a blog post with less than 100 characters of content, it's likely that they accidentally pasted the wrong text, or misunderstood which information goes into which field. We can improve the user's experience and the stability of our codebase by notifying users about these kinds of mistakes before bad data gets into the database.

To get started, run:

$ bundle install
$ rails db:migrate db:seed

This is a barebones app with two models, Author and Post. Right now, you can...

• GET /authors/1: View an author
• POST /authors: Create an author
• GET /posts/1: View a post
• PATCH /posts/1: Update a post

Deliverables

Author Validations

Add validations to Author such that...

1. The name cannot be blank
2. The e-mail is unique

Post Validations

Add validations to Post such that...

1. The title cannot be blank
2. The category is either "Fiction" or "Non-Fiction"
3. The content is at least 100 characters long

Controller Actions

1. Change AuthorsController#create to send back the error messages if the new author is invalid
2. Change PostsController#update to send back the error messages if the updated post is invalid