I have a rails (4.1.6) Blog app that contains Posts. It uses devise for users and I am in the process of integrating the paper_trail gem for versioning.
Prior to integrating with paper_trail, each Post had a belongs_to :user, which was filled with the current_user at the top of create: @post = Post.new(user: current_user). However, since paper_trail stores the creator of items, I would like to use @post.originator instead to access the creator.
In this blog app, only a signed in user can create posts. In my validator, I need to check that @post.originator exists, but while validating my post, the originator is blank (presumably because paper_trail does not save the paper trail data until the post is created in the database).
So, when I create a post and the validator runs, using originator instead, I get an error that the post cannot be created since there is no originator.
The options I see are:
- Validate user_signed_in? in the controller actions, and not validate for creator (user/originator) in the model
- Create a redundant user field in all my models to store the creator of a post, and use that for validation
- Do both 1 and 2
- Somehow (how?) make the paper_trail provide the model's originator and use that in validation
I suspect the ideal approach is #3 or at least #1 or #2, but I wanted to check if there was any way to achieve #4.
Thanks Anand