How do you validate uniqueness of a pair of ids in Ruby on Rails?

Question

Suppose the following DB migration in Ruby:

    create_table :question_votes do |t|
      t.integer :user_id
      t.integer :question_id
      t.integer :vote

          


        

Answer 1

If using mysql, you can do it in the database using a unique index. It's something like:

add_index :question_votes, [:question_id, :user_id], :unique => true

This is going to raise an exception when you try to save a doubled-up combination of question_id/user_id, so you'll have to experiment and figure out which exception to catch and handle.