Rails Validation Syntax

Tonight while working through Agile Web Development with Rails, I was finishing up Chapter 7 and doing some of the extra stuff at the end. One of the exercises was adding validation to the Product model that checks the length of product titles is at least 10 characters.

No big deal! I fired up Rails API and found what I was looking for.

validates_length_of :title, :minimum => 10, :message => 'must be at least 10 characters.'

Ahh, perfect! Plus, editing the default message is the second optional exercise. Easy enough. But wait, what's this?

The book had me write validation like so:

validates :price, :numericality => {:greater_than_or_equal_to => 0.01}, :message => 'must be a number.'

This is a slightly different syntax than the validation I found on the Rails API and I don't like it as much. First, it's not as immediately obvious what this validation is doing. Second, it just feels clunkier. So since I'd already written a validation method in a different syntax, I figured this would do the same thing and be in a more readable format:

validates_numericality_of :price, :greater_than_or_equal_to => 0.01, :message => 'must be a number.'

And what do you know? It works! Is there anything I should be aware of when writing validation like this? Any ideas why Agile Web Development with Rails wrote it the other way? Personal preference of the programmer, perhaps? I'm assuming this is a standard way of writing validation, both because it's the same syntax I found on the Rails API, and because it's more readable. (It's also 5 characters shorter, but who's counting? A piece of Javascript I found online, that's who!)

Ahh, feels good to be making progress. I got hung up for a bit writing tests in the last chapter, until I realized I'd added a stray period and it was holding everything up. Anyone else try running test:unites by mistake? I've probably done it 3 or 5 times in the last 18 hours.