Why isn't my inclusion validation passing?

Question

This should be a no brainer. I have a Sinatra application with RSpec and, for some reason, my validations are failing with the inclusion validation.

This is my code:

class Employee < ActiveRecord::Base
   validates :department, inclusion: { in: w%(Sales, Finance, Marketing) }
end

This is the spec file:

it 'should save a valid employee' do
  employee = Employee.new(name: 'Employee One',
                        email: 'example@gmail.com',
                        title: 'Software Engineer',
                        department: 'Sales')
  expect(employee).to be_valid
end

This test fails because the department field is not 'included in the list'. This is aggravating because it fails no matter what field I put. Errors like these are usually from something simple.

What am I missing?

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score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 06 '15 at 00:50

It seems that you have a syntax error, I believe w% should be %w.

Your %w syntax is conflicting with your actual list. The %w makes commas not necessary and actually adds them to your list (which is not what you want). Remove them.

 %w(Sales, Finance, Marketing)
 => ["Sales,", "Finance,", "Marketing"]

vs

%w(Sales Finance Marketing)
 => ["Sales", "Finance", "Marketing"]

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:52

%w is a short-cut for building array of strings. I think you are trying to build an array of strings like this:

["Sales", "Finance", "Marketing"]

In that case the correct form of using %w would be:

%w(Sales Finance Marketing)

See this post for more information on %w syntax in Ruby.

Also, look at the Rails Documentation for inclusion where %w is used correctly.

So, to solve your problem, change your Employee class to look like this:

class Employee < ActiveRecord::Base
   validates :department, inclusion: { in: %w(Sales Finance Marketing) }
end

Why isn't my inclusion validation passing?

2 Answers2