Fully custom validation error message with Rails

Using Rails I'm trying to get an error message like "The song field can't be empty" on save. Doing the following:

validates_presence_of :song_rep_xyz, :message => "can't be empty"

... only displays "Song Rep XYW can't be empty", which is not good because the title of the field is not user friendly. How can I change the title of the field itself ? I could change the actual name of the field in the database, but I have multiple "song" fields and I do need to have specific field names.

I don't want to hack around rails' validation process and I feel there should be a way of fixing that.

From stackoverflow

• Try this.

  class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    validate do |user|
      user.errors.add_to_base("Country can't be blank") if user.country_iso.blank?
    end
  end
  

  I found this here.

  Here is another way to do it. What you do is define a human_attribute_name method on the model class. The method is passed the column name as a string and returns the string to use in validation messages.

  class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  
    HUMANIZED_ATTRIBUTES = {
      :email => "E-mail address"
    }
  
    def self.human_attribute_name(attr)
      HUMANIZED_ATTRIBUTES[attr.to_sym] || super
    end
  
  end
  

  The above code is from here

  marcgg : The problem is that my field is called :song_rep_xyz (well, something complicated), which is not user friendly

  marcgg : I just edited the question to be clearer

  Yar : Nice, thanks for this!

• I recommend installing the custom_err_msg plugin which lets you do stuff like:

  validates_presence_of :non_friendly_field_name, :message => "^Friendly field name is blank"
  

  marcgg : thanks! isn't there a way to do it without a plugin ?

• Now, the accepted way to set the humanized names is to use locales.

  # config/locales/en.yml
  en:
    activerecord:
      attributes:
        user:
          email: "E-mail address"