If I have the following model

user -----5 course_registration *------ course

ie a user can register for 5 courses and a course can have an unlimited number of students. I want to do this with Rails validations. The below outlines some best practise and explains how to collect the validation errors when they occur.

I then define the following models

class Course < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :course_registrations
  has_many :students, :class_name => 'User', :through => :course_registrations, :source => :user
end

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :course_registrations
  has_many :courses, :through => :course_registrations
end

class CourseRegistration < ActiveRecord::Base

  belongs_to :course
  belongs_to :user

  # These join attributes should be immutable
  attr_readonly :course_id, :user_id

  validates_presence_of :course_id
  validates_presence_of :user_id

  MAXIMUM_COURSES = 5

  validate :on => :create do
    if user.course_registrations.size >= MAXIMUM_COURSES
      errors.add :user, "can only apply for #{MAXIMUM_COURSES} courses. Please remove one."
    end
  end

end

The above is the key reason for using has many through instead of using has and belongs to many. HABTM uses an implicit join model whereas HMT you have to be more explicit but you then have the flexibility to do smarter validations on the collection relation.

You may have been tempted to solve such a problem with after_add callback on the user model. However that doesn’t cover all use cases of creating the registration instances and you can easily miss out on the validation.

A thing to note

@user = User.create 

@user.courses = 5.times.map { Course.create }  

is ok but

@user.courses = 6.times.map { Course.create }  

will throw an exception and so will

@user.create :courses => ( 6.times.map { Course.create } )

even though you use create and not create!. The exception has been thrown from the implicit creation of CourseRegistration objects that associate the User and Course objects.

Therefore you will always need to rescue exceptions in your controllers if you are doing anything like the above rather than just check the boolean of @user.save

Note that the current rails_admin gem doesn’t handle validation faults in has many through relations and produces a backtrace. I’ve created a fork at

https://github.com/bradphelan/rails_admin

which fixes the problem.