Rails - Jun 2010 - Best practice for removing leading and trailing whitespaces

I want to remove the leading and training spaces for most of the
resources in my rails application

For a new POST request, rails does the xml parsing and passes the params
hash to the controller. Some of the parameters have leading and/or
trailing whitespaces which are causing problems (e.g. new resources
being created rather than using the old ones). I don''t want to put the
code in all the controllers to strip the whitespaces for different
resources/params.

I did find the following pattern:
http://scottmoonen.com/2009/05/08/rails-pattern-trim-spaces-on-input/

Is there another better approach to solve this? I was thinking of
configuring controller xml parser to remove these whitespaces. Is that
possible?

Thanks,
-Rakesh
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On Jun 25, 2010, at 1:26 PM, Rakesh Arora wrote:
> I want to remove the leading and training spaces for most of the
> resources in my rails application
> 
> For a new POST request, rails does the xml parsing and passes the params
> hash to the controller. Some of the parameters have leading and/or
> trailing whitespaces which are causing problems (e.g. new resources
> being created rather than using the old ones). I don''t want to put
the
> code in all the controllers to strip the whitespaces for different
> resources/params.
> 
> I did find the following pattern:
> http://scottmoonen.com/2009/05/08/rails-pattern-trim-spaces-on-input/
> 
> Is there another better approach to solve this? I was thinking of
> configuring controller xml parser to remove these whitespaces. Is that
> possible?
That looks like the ideal way to do it.  This sort of thing belongs in the model
as it will stop you from making a mistake that one time you use ./script/console
to make that one change....

I''m sure you *could* modify the XML parser, but why?  The moment you
add another way to access the data you''d have to do it there as well. 
And what if you have a field that you want to allow white space?

-philip

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This pattern is not working for find_or_create_by_***:

http://scottmoonen.com/2009/05/08/rails-pattern-trim-spaces-on-input/

I am getting ConstraintException:column *** is not valid for the 
resources that are already in the database.

I understand that this is because trimmed_field is using 
before_validation callback.

Any idea how to fix this?

Thanks,
-Rakesh
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Some more information about my failure scenario:

Code in my controller''s create:
XXX.find_or_create_by_yyy(params[:input])

Here is the spec code that is failing

xxx = XXX.create!(:yyy => ''abc'')
#Send a post request to the controller with a resource that already 
exists
#but include leading and training blank spaces
post :create, {:input => {:yyy => ''    abc   ''}}

I am using the pattern defined here to strip the whitespaces:
http://scottmoonen.com/2009/05/08/rails-pattern-trim-spaces-on-input/

However, that only happens at before_validation. So find is not stipping 
the whitespaces from my post request. Now it tries to create a new 
resource and the whitespaces are stripped (before_validation callback) 
causing ConstraintException:column yyy is not valid for the resources 
that are already in the database.

Thanks,
-Rakesh
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