how do I make changes to inpus from edit/update in Rails?

I have he following code in my update action for a Controller. The code works when in the create, but doesn't seem to kick in under update:

def update
 @contact = Contact.find(params[:id])

 # bug, why isn't this working? 
 unless @contact.fax.empty?
   @contact.fax = "1" + Phony.normalize(@contact.fax)
 end

 unless @contact.phone.empty?
   @contact.phone = "1" + Phony.normalize(@contact.phone)
end

if @contact.update_attri开发者_开发知识库butes(params[:contact])
   flash[:notice] = "Successfully updated contact."
   redirect_to @contact
 else
   render :action => 'edit'
 end

end

these should be in your model. FAT model, SKINNY controller:

# contact.rb
...
# may need require 'phony' and include Phony
before_save :prep

def prep
  self.fax = 1+Phony.normalize(self.fax) unless self.fax.empty? || (self.fax.length == 11 && self.fax[0] == 1)
  self.phone = 1+Phony.normalize(self.phone) unless self.phone.empty? || (self.phone.length == 11 && self.phone[0] == 1)
end
...

Edit:

As I mentioned in my comment, it's better in terms of storage and efficiency and indexing to store as a bigint unsigned in your database and add the prettiness to the numbers in a method. This way, your site is always normalized (no two phone numbers will ever look different because they are formatted 'on the fly').

# sample methods
def phony
  str = self.phone.to_s
  "#{str[0..2]}-#{str[3..5]}-#{str[6..10]}"
end

# use a similar method for faxing, but I'll write
# this one differently just to show flexibility
def faxy
  str = self.fax.to_s
  "+1 (#{str[0..2]}) #{str[3..5]}-#{str[6..10]}"
end

you never call save on @contact in your unless blocks, so your call to @contact.update_attributes(params[:contact]) undoes any change you made in those blocks (because those keys in the params hash correspond to empty values).

def update
  @contact = Contact.find(params[:id])

  if @contact.update_attributes(params[:contact])
    @contact.update_attributes(:fax   => "1" + Phony.normalize(@contact.fax))   unless @contact.fax.empty?
    @contact.update_attributes(:phone => "1" + Phony.normalize(@contact.phone)) unless @contact.phone.empty?

    flash[:notice] = "Successfully updated contact."
    redirect_to @contact
  else
    render :action => 'edit'
  end
end

You could use update_attribute but that bypasses validation.

You could also use a before_save callback in the Contact class, but you would have to check if the phone or fax are already "normalized."