adding additional validation to email uniqueness

[dhruvg]

I am maintaining another model for each user called secondary_email where users can basically tag on multiple email addresses to their account. I want to modify my User model to also check that a new user's email is not an active secondary email... Here is the code I have so far:

acts_as_authentic do |c|
c.merge_validates_length_of_password_confirmation_field_options(
:minimum => 6, :maximum => 40)
c.merge_validates_uniqueness_of_email_field_options(:if =>
"#{!SecondaryEmail.active?(email_field)}".to_sym)
end

returns true if the given email is active, false otherwise

def self.active?(email)
SecondaryEmail.where("email = :email and pending = 0",
:email => email).length > 0
end

It doesn't seem to be passing my test case:

it "should reject if email is an active secondary email" do
@user = User.unsafe_create(@attr)
secondary_email = Factory(:secondary_email, :user_id => @user[:id])
User.unsafe_create(@attr.merge(:email =>
secondary_email[:email])).should_not be_valid
end

The Factory which creates the SecondaryEmail appropriately sets pending to 0 which is checked in the active? function:

Secondary Email

Factory.define :secondary_email do |se|
se.sequence(:email) { |n| "voltaire_se#{n}@example.com"}
se.pending "0"
se.user_id "1"
se.crypt "random"
se.num_verifications "5"
end

So, I am pretty sure my test case is correct. I think the issue likes in the acts_as_authentic block -- is the code above the right way to go about it? What is the correct approach?

Thanks!

[latortuga]

Your :if condition will evaluate to :true or :false, neither of which are methods on the model. This may be of some help.