Please teach me to fish: how do I navigate the edit/suggested-edit code to apply the same error check to both? Question

I was trying to fix what I thought was an easy bug: suggested edits can add restricted tags (the ones only moderators can apply), which creates a suggested edit that most reviewers can't approve. We already prevent you from adding those tags when you directly edit a post, so I figured -- how hard could it be to apply that same logic to suggested edits?

Harder than I thought, apparently. I don't know if my mental block is due to insufficient Ruby/Rails knowledge, insufficient MVC clues, or something about the QPixel code in particular.

Editing through either path leads to the same form, in app/views/posts/edit.html.erb. For direct saves, there's this check:

<% if @post.errors.any? %>
  <div class="notice is-danger is-filled">
    <p>The following errors prevented your post from being saved:</p>
    <ul>
      <% @post.errors.full_messages.each do |msg| %>
        <li><%= msg %></li>
      <% end %>
    </ul>
  </div>
<% end %>

Ok, I said -- how do the errors get there? This question led me to app/controllers/posts_controller.rb and specifically the update function. I'm having a little trouble following the logic, but the outline seems to be (in pseudocode):

if current user can edit
  if current user can push to network
    (lots of stuff we don't care about here)
  else (do an edit in a transaction)
else // current user cannot edit
  create suggested edit and send notification to owner

That last part, in a little more detail:

        data = {
          post: @post,
          user: current_user,
          body: body_rendered == @post.body ? nil : body_rendered,
          title: params[:post][:title] == @post.title ? nil : params[:post][:title],
          tags_cache: new_tags_cache == @post.tags_cache ? @post.tags_cache : new_tags_cache,
          body_markdown: params[:post][:body_markdown] == @post.body_markdown ? nil : params[:post][:body_markdown],
          comment: params[:edit_comment],
          active: true, accepted: false
        }
// NOTE the absence of any error checks here
        edit = SuggestedEdit.new(data)

This seems to be the place where I should check for errors, same as we do for direct edits. The first block of code I quoted in this question is how we report errors to the user, but where do they get checked and set?

I grepped for the text of the error message, which led me to app/models/post.rb, in a function called moderator_tags. A comment in the source code says "intended to be used for validation" -- sounds like just what I need! So then I grepped for that function name, looking for where it's called.

That's where I got stuck:

$ grep -r moderator_tags app/*

app/controllers/tags_controller.rb:      exec_sql([sql.gsub('$TABLENAME', 'categories_moderator_tags'), @primary.id, @subordinate.id])
app/controllers/tags_controller.rb:      tables = ['posts_tags', 'categories_moderator_tags', 'categories_required_tags', 'categories_topic_tags',
app/controllers/tags_controller.rb~:      exec_sql([sql.gsub('$TABLENAME', 'categories_moderator_tags'), @primary.id, @subordinate.id])
app/controllers/tags_controller.rb~:      tables = ['posts_tags', 'categories_moderator_tags', 'categories_required_tags', 'categories_topic_tags',
app/controllers/admin_controller.rb:    meta_category.moderator_tags << Tag.unscoped.where(community: @community, name: status_tags)
app/models/category.rb:  has_and_belongs_to_many :moderator_tags, class_name: 'Tag', join_table: 'categories_moderator_tags'
app/models/post.rb:  validate :moderator_tags, if: -> { post_type.has_tags && post_type.has_category && tags_cache_changed? }
app/models/post.rb:  def moderator_tags
app/models/post.rb:    mod_tags = category&.moderator_tags&.map(&:name)
app/views/categories/_form.html.erb:      <%= f.select :moderator_tag_ids, options_for_select(@category.moderator_tags.map { |t| [t.name, t.id] },

What should I do next? How do I find how that validation is done for regular edits, so I can (I hope) apply it to the suggested-edit case and prevent an unapprovable suggestion from getting created?

posted about 2 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

22d ago by trichoplax‭

Monica Cellio‭ staff

171 reputation 9 5 28 9