(I wasted about half an hour on this last night, and am now kicking myself about how simple it was. Given that… definitely worth documenting the problem, so that no-one else gets held up on it.)

I’m currently working on some forum software (before you yawn: it’s not your average forum, it’s not worth the effort forking Beast, and besides, it’s a learning exercise). In this forum, when you create a topic, you also create the first post in the topic at the same time. Here’s how that happens (I don’t think I need to show the form view – the controller will suffice):

@topic = Topic.new params[:topic].merge(:user => current_user, 
                                :forum => Forum.find(params[:id]))

post = @topic.posts.build(params[:post].merge(:user => current_user))

Unfortunately, I was running into all sorts of problems – in that even though the forms were filled out and being passed to the controller, the topic wasn’t being created. This was because the post wasn’t validating. Turns out the problem was that in my post.rb, I’d said that a Post validates_presence_of :topic_id. This validation was clearly being run before the topic was created; given we’re using build to make sure the post is attached to the topic, I don’t think we need that validation. Once I stripped that out, everything worked fine.

A pretty trivial error, I know, but once my tests started failing, I had to take the application apart a little to find out what was going on. In a nutshell: I don’t think you always need to validate relationships that have to exist for the model to make any sense.

Of course, if there’s a way I can keep the validation of topic present but still build the topic/post combination as above… comments are very welcome.