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

Except for writing your own validate method, the best you could do with validates_uniqueness_of is this:

validates_uniqueness_of :user_id, :scope => "question_id"

This will check that the user_id is unique within all rows with the same question_id as the record you are attempting to insert.

But that's not what you want.

I believe you're looking for the combination of :user_id and :question_id to be unique across the database.

In that case you need to do two things:

1. Write your own validate method.
2. Create a constraint in the database because there's still a chance that your app will process two records at the same time.