ditoinfo in english

Henrik, from The Pug Automatic, suggested a great way of having custom column names on the rails validation error messages, by rewriting the human_attribute_name of ActiveRecord. There’s an example on his blog (really worth a look and not only for this specific post) on how to do that. Beware that it uses a deprecated method of ActiveRecord, that may be removed in future versions of Rails (it is still there on Rails 2.0). The workaround is discussed there too on the comments: One could rewrite the humanize method of String – that would make changes global – or we can just ask politely for the core developers not to remove the method .

Here is an example of how to do that, I used it on an application of mine. On this case, the collumns on the database are in english, which I prefer working with when programming , but the users can barely read Portuguese, so I need to translate to them:

class Ticket < ActiveRecord::Base
  HUMANIZED_ATTRIBUTES = {
    :description => "Descrição",
    :category => "Categoria",
    :title => "Assunto"
  }

  def self.human_attribute_name(attr)
    HUMANIZED_ATTRIBUTES(attr.to_sym) || super
  end
end