Things To Remember While Working With Uniqueness In Rails

♦ The Problem

Consider the following relation where poll is having many options and each option of the poll must be having a unique description,

Now, when trying to create a poll with its options using nested attributes, uniqueness validation is not getting applied due to race condition.

> poll = Poll.new(options_attributes: [ { description: 'test' }, { description: 'test' } ])
> poll.save
=> true
>
> poll.options
=> [#<Option id: 1, description: "test">, #<Option id: 2, description: "test">]

♦ Why it is occurring ?

There is a section in UniquenessValidator class, which mentions that the ActiveRecord::Validations#save does not guarantee the prevention of duplicates because, uniqueness checks are performed at application level which are prone to race condition when creating/updating records at the same time. Also, while saving the records, UniquenessValidator is checking uniqueness against the records which are in database only, but not for the records which are…