Uniqueness validation not working on has_many :though association on rails 5

Question

Models

class User < ApplicationRecord
    has_many :memberships
    has_many :pages, through: :memberships 
end

class Page < ApplicationRecord
    has_many :memberships
    has_many :users, through: :memberships 
end

class Membership < ApplicationRecord
    belongs_to :user
    belongs_to :page

    validates :page_id, uniqueness: { scope: :user_id}
end

Am able to create multiple user on pages and pages on user, it's like the validation isn't getting called.

Answer 1

To trigger the validations in a associated model you need to use validates_associated :

class User < ApplicationRecord
  has_many :memberships
  has_many :pages, through: :memberships
  validates_associated :memberships
end

class Page < ApplicationRecord
  has_many :memberships
  has_many :users, through: :memberships
  validates_associated :memberships
end

class Membership < ApplicationRecord
  belongs_to :user
  belongs_to :page
  validates :page_id, uniqueness: { scope: :user_id}
end

This can be a real gotcha as validations on associations are not called when they are created implicitly.

Additionally its a good idea to create a compound database index which prevents possible race conditions :

class AddCompoundIndexToMemberships < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
  def change
    add_index :memberships, [:page_id, :user_id], unique: true
  end
end

This ensures on the DB level that no two identical rows can be created.