Best place to store model specific constants in rails 3.1?

Question

I have a field type in a model called user which is an int in the db. The value of the int speficies the type of store it is. Example:

Answer 1

Since Rails 4.1, there is support for ActiveRecord::Enum.

There's a useful tutorial here, but in short:

# models/user.rb
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  enum family_role: [ :mum, :dad, :grandmother]
end

# logic elsewhere
u = User.first
u.family_role = 'mum'
u.mum? # => true
u.family_role # => 'mum'

Note: To convert from your current scheme (where your database already stores numbers corresponding to values), you should use the hash syntax:

enum family_role: { mum: 0, dad: 1, grandmother: 2 }

I would additionally propose that you reserve 0 for the default state, but that's just one convention and not critical.