---
title: "Rails 5 accepts 1 or true for acceptance validation"
description:
  'Rails 5 now allows accepting true in acceptance validation. Previously only
  "1" was accepted in acceptance validation.'
canonical_url: "https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/rails-5-accepts-1-or-true-for-acceptance-validation"
markdown_url: "https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/rails-5-accepts-1-or-true-for-acceptance-validation.md"
---

# Rails 5 accepts 1 or true for acceptance validation

Rails 5 now allows accepting true in acceptance validation. Previously only "1"
was accepted in acceptance validation.

- Author: Mohit Natoo
- Published: May 13, 2016
- Categories: Rails 5, Rails

`validates_acceptance_of` is a good validation tool for asking users to accept
"terms of service" or similar items.

Before Rails 5, the only acceptable value for a `validates_acceptance_of`
validation was `1`.

```ruby

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  validates_acceptance_of :terms_of_service
end

> user = User.new(terms_of_service: "1")
> user.valid?
#=> true

```

Having acceptable value of `1` does cause some ambiguity because general purpose
of acceptance validation is for attributes that hold boolean values.

So in order to have `true` as acceptance value we had to pass `accept` option to
`validates_acceptance_of` as shown below.

```ruby

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  validates_acceptance_of :terms_of_service, accept: true
end

> user = User.new(terms_of_service: true)
> user.valid?
#=> true

> user.terms_of_service = '1'
> user.valid?
#=> false

```

Now this comes with the cost that `1` is no longer an acceptable value.

In Rails 5, we have `true` as a
[default value for acceptance](https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/18439) along
with the already existing acceptable value of `1`.

In Rails 5 the previous example would look like as shown below.

```ruby

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  validates_acceptance_of :terms_of_service
end

> user = User.new(terms_of_service: true)
> user.valid?
#=> true

> user.terms_of_service = '1'
> user.valid?
#=> true

```

## Rails 5 allows user to have custom set of acceptable values

In Rails 5, `:accept` option of `validates_acceptance_of` method supports an
array of values unlike a single value that we had before.

So in our example if we are to validate our `terms_of_service` attribute with
any of `true`, `"y"`, `"yes"` we could have our validation as follows.

```ruby

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  validates_acceptance_of :terms_of_service, accept: [true, "y", "yes"]
end

> user = User.new(terms_of_service: true)
> user.valid?
#=> true

> user.terms_of_service = 'y'
> user.valid?
#=> true

> user.terms_of_service = 'yes'
> user.valid?
#=> true

```

## Links

- [Human page](https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/rails-5-accepts-1-or-true-for-acceptance-validation)