Strong Params Basics

What are Strong Params?

To understand the goal of strong params, let's pretend that you run a pharmacy. What would happen if you let all prescription orders come through without checking for: valid prescriptions, driver licenses, etc.? (Spoiler alert: you'd probably end up in jail). It would be criminal to run a pharmacy without verifying that orders were legitimate. In the same way Rails application (starting in Rails 4+) wanted to shore up some security vulnerabilities and now require that you whitelist the parameters that are permitted when you're sending form data to the database.

Setup

To prevent confusion, in previous lessons I manually turned off the strong parameter requirement. Let's discover first why strong params were created and then work with them.

Why Strong Params

In the Rails app in this lesson there is our blog application with Strong Params disabled. Create a new Post by going to /posts/new. Once you have created that post, go ahead and edit it at /posts/1/edit. You'll notice there is no Description field! In this case, I don't want the user to be able to modify the description of a post once it's been created. This happens in all kinds of different cases. You wouldn't want a bank user to be able to edit their account number or balance, would you? But! balance is still a field on the account class. In this case, description is still an attribute for the post class. Let's see if a user could "hack" our form to be able to modify the description.

1. Right click and inspect the page
2. Find the input for title. it should look like this: <input type="text" value="asdferwer" name="post[title]" id="post_title">
3. Right click on choose "Edit as HTML"
4. Add in the following new Description field:

<br>
<label>Description:</label>
<br>
<input type="text" value="malicious description" name="post[description]" id="post_description">

5. Click somewhere else and look! a wild description field appears.
6. Now type in some message into the new field.
7. Click submit and you'll notice that the description has been updated. What a nefarious hack!

That is the problem that strong params was created to fix. We want to make sure that when users submit a form we only let the field we want get by.

Code Implementation

Let's enable Strong Params. To do this, open up config/application.rb and delete the line that says: config.action_controller.permit_all_parameters = true. Now restart your rails server and navigate to localhost:3000/posts/new, once there fill out the form and click submit. You'll see we get the following ForbiddenAttributesError:

What this means is that Rails needs to be told what parameters are allowed to be submitted through the form to the database. The default is to let nothing through.

The same error would occur if you were trying to update a record. So how do we fix this? Let's update the create and update methods to look like the code below:

# app/controllers/posts_controller.rb

def create
  @post = Post.new(params.require(:post).permit(:title, :description))
  @post.save
  redirect_to post_path(@post)
end

def update
  @post = Post.find(params[:id])
  @post.update(params.require(:post).permit(:title))
  redirect_to post_path(@post)
end

If you go back to the web browser and click refresh you'll see everything is working for both the create and update actions. Running the Rspec tests reveals that our specs are now passing again as well. You'll notice that our update only has a :title in the permit method. This is because, given our forms, we only want the title to be submitable! If you go and do your nefarious hack again, it won't work. Thwarted!!

Permit vs. Require

What is the deal with the #permit vs #require? The #require method is the most restrictive. It means that the params that gets passed in must contain a key called "post". If it's not included then it fails and the user gets an error. The #permit method is a bit looser. It means that the params hash may have whatever keys are in it. So in the create case, it may have the :title and :description keys. If it doesn't have one of those keys it's no problem, the hash just won't accept any other keys.

DRYing up Strong Params

The code we wrote above is great if you only have a create method in your controller. However, if you have a standard CRUD setup you will also need to implement the same code in your update action. In our example we had different code for create and update, but generally you have the same items. It's a standard Rails practice to remove code repetition, so let's abstract the strong parameter call into its own method in the controller:

Now, both our create and update methods in the posts controller can simply call post_params.

# app/controllers/posts_controller.rb

def create
  @post = Post.new(post_params)
  @post.save
  redirect_to post_path(@post)
end

def update
  @post = Post.find(params[:id])
  @post.update(post_params)
  redirect_to post_path(@post)
end

private

def post_params
  params.require(:post).permit(:title, :description)
end

This is a very helpful method since if you duplicated the strong parameter call in both the create and update methods you would need to change both method arguments every time you change the database schema for the posts table... and that sounds like a bad way to live. However by creating this post_params method we can simply make one change and both methods will automatically be able to have the proper attributes whitelisted.

Hm, but didn't we say above that we only wanted to permit updates to :title in the update action? We can make sure that we meet that requirement with a slightly fancy splat:

# app/controllers/posts_controller.rb

def create
  @post = Post.new(post_params(:title, :description))
  @post.save
  redirect_to post_path(@post)
end

def update
  @post = Post.find(params[:id])
  @post.update(post_params(:title))
  redirect_to post_path(@post)
end

private


# We pass the permitted fields in as *args;
# this keeps `post_params` pretty dry while
# still allowing slightly different behavior
# depending on the controller action
def post_params(*args)
  params.require(:post).permit(*args)
end

Test this out in the browser and you can see that you can now create and updated posts without any errors. And you will also notice that all of the Rspec tests are still passing.

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