Rails - Jul 2005 - How to beautify validation messages

I''ve got a class that uses validation without inheriting from
ActiveRecord.  It looks like this:

class SearchRequest < ValidatingBase
	attr_accessor :fullname, :email, :phone
  validates_presence_of :fullname, :email, :phone

  def initialize(req)
  	req.each {|key, val| self.send(key + ''='', val) } if req
  end

end

Its controller action looks like this:

def searchreq
	@req = SearchRequest.new(params[:req])
	if params[:req]
		if @req.valid?
			# send email
		end
	end
end

When I submit the form without the required parameters, it gives me
the following error:

3 errors prohibited this req from being saved

There were problems with the following fields:

    * fullname can''t be blank
    * phone can''t be blank
    * email can''t be blank

I want the error message to say "request" instead of "req"
and give
human-readable names for the class accessors instead of their actual
variable names.  Is there a way to do this?

Thanks,

Carl

On 28/07/2005, at 4:24 PM, Carl Youngblood wrote:
> I want the error message to say "request" instead of
"req" and give
> human-readable names for the class accessors instead of their actual
> variable names.  Is there a way to do this?
You could write a method in your model to map db field names to 
friendly names and then write your own helper (similar to 
error_messages_for) that uses that method when outputting the errors.

See the source of ActiveRecordHelper::error_messages_for for more info.

- tim