---
title: forget about the view
teaser: Gotchas with enum types in views.
tags: web,rails
author: Jared Carroll
published_on: 2007-09-24
---

Recently I was looking at some of `ActiveRecord`'s class level validation
methods and realizing I don't really use a lot of them.  Until I took a look at
`#validates_inclusion_of`.

Say we got:

```ruby
class Event < ActiveRecord::Base

  TYPES = %w(daily weekly monthly)

end
```

And a schema like `events (id, title, event_type)`, with a view
file `app/views/events/new.rhtml`:

```erb
<%= form.select :event_type, Event::TYPES, :include_blank => true %>
```

So when POST'ing from the form on `app/views/events/new.rhtml` there's no chance
I'll get an event type other than the 3 (or blank) I show in the drop down list.

What if someone did a POST via curl and did

    event[title]=title&amp;event[event_type]=asdf

'asdf' is not one of my `Event::TYPES` but my `Event` record is still going to
save.  I know this is probably far fetched but we should be building our models
without any notion of the UI, be it browser or not.  So we need validations for
everything.

Here's what we should be doing

```ruby
class Event < ActiveRecord::Base

  TYPES = %w(daily weekly monthly)

  validates_inclusion_of :event_type,
    :in => TYPES

end
```