I have a Hotels table in my database, and one of the columns is :status (integer). I'm looking to convert these integers into strings, so 1 = "Awaiting Contract", 2 = "Designing" and so on...
I have searched Stack for some answers, and the lack of them makes me think that I'm coming at this problem from the wrong angle? I used to do this in PHP whilst pulling the data. New-ish to Rails so any help, or best practise advice would be much appreciated.
Check enum of ActiveRecord - doc.
Here you can configure your :status:
class Hotel < ActiveRecord::Base
enum status: { waiting_contract: 1, designing: 2 }
def format_status
status.to_s.humanize
end
end
It'll create methods like this:
hotel.waiting_contract?
hotel.designing?
hotel.waiting_contract!
hotel.format_status # => "Waiting contract"
Hope that helps!
UPDATE
Similar functionality might be achieved by overriding the status method itself, although having separate methods is more advised:
class Hotel < ActiveRecord::Base
enum status: { waiting_contract: 1, designing: 2 }
def status
super.to_s.humanize
end
end
Furthermore, decorators are something you should look into for view-specific methods.
hotel.waiting_contract!), when asked for status "waiting_contract" will be returned - hotel.status # => "waiting_contract", but in templates "Waiting Contract" would be expected... I'll update answer with some suggestion to this
status using super.to_s.humanize in the new method's body. although, the wiser option would be indeed to have separate methods. and to shift view-specific methods to decorators.status only because of personal preference (experience?). In my code I'd rather avoid this approach (what if in future I would need "original" output of status method? I'd break every occurrence in my current code). However, it's worth mentioning it is possible and completely valid code!It depends what you need the list for. An alternative to the above ideas, is to create a hash. Hashes are very Ruby and designed just for this sort of paired data.
Create the hash, (enumeration typing is automatic.)
my_h = { "waiting" => 1, "design" => 2 }
Then to access
my_h["waiting"] = 1
There's much more you can do with hashes. This is just the simplest case.
A hash may or not fulfill your needs, but it's a splendid tool that comes with a nice set of Ruby worker methods.
