Rails validation: Which method is preferred

Question

In Ruby on Rails there are two ways to validate, for instance, the presence of input fields. Say I want to make sure the user has filled out my fields called value and name. I could put in my model either:

validates_presence_of :value, :name

## Or

validates :value, presence: true
validates :name, presence: true

In this situation judging strictly by DRYness, method 1 looks better, but in the application I'm working on I have the following validation:

validates_presence_of :value, :name
validates_uniqueness_of :value
validates_numericality_of :value, :only_integer => true

## Which I can refactor to:

validates :value, presence: true, uniqueness: true, numericality: { only_integer: true }
validates :name, presence: true

And in this case the second method looks better.

• Is there a generally preferred method, or is it case-by-case? (If it's case-by-case, wouldn't it be confusing for maintainers?)
• Is it safe to adopt one method for the entire application? (If so, which one should I adopt?)

Answer 1

Maintainability trumps all. Unless you have a pressing reason not to, follow the conventions as they appear in the reference material.

In this case, the first Google hit is the documentation for validations at rubyonrails.org, which shows a strong preference to the validates form. The only counter example I could find was validates_associated, which makes sense as it does not actually validate the current object.

I would recommend picking one way to do it, as it facilitates visually scanning the code.

Personally, I prefer the flexibility of the validates version.