Two Interesting Things About ActiveRecord Validations

You know how people always tell you “once you know how this works, you can break the rules when you need”. I had to apply this maxim recently. I had a situation where I needed to create new records on a form (so they would display as lineitems), but needed to defer validating these items until later. (In my case it was time sheet entries, but it doesnt really matter.) I struggled with how to do this until I stumbled on these two gems of knowledge. (which I probably should have remembered anyway)

ActiveRecord#save(false) you can force active record to save and ignore validation errors

ActiveRecord#update_attribute This does the same thing as above, but on a per attribute basis

Very handy. And yes.. I know that this is “breaking the rules” because I am skipping validation. But in this particular case.. it makes sense