How to store and compare :symbols in an ActiveRecord (Ruby on Rails)

Question

I thought it would be good to populate a status field in an activeRecord table using constants. However, when it comes to checking if this status has a particular status, I\'m h

Answer 1

With Rails 4.1.0, you'd probably want to use Active Record enums.

To quote the official release notes:

class Conversation < ActiveRecord::Base
  enum status: [ :active, :archived ]
end
 
conversation.archived!
conversation.active? # => false
conversation.status  # => "archived"
 
Conversation.archived # => Relation for all archived Conversations
 
Conversation.statuses # => { "active" => 0, "archived" => 1 }