Question

I have a model class Person, and I create instances of them using:

person = Person.create!

Now I want to say that this person was born in California, USA, but in this peculiar way:

person = Person.create!({:name => "Matt", :born => "USCA"})

This means there are two characters to identify the country and another two characters to identify the state.
But I don’t want to store the string in the database, I want to store in a structured way, like:

| Name | Country | State |
| Matt | USA | California |

Where can I parse the string to assign the country and state based on it? Which method in the model?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Something like:

before_save :parse_country_code

def parse_country_code
  if born_changed?
    self.state = ...
    self.country = ...
  end
  true # avoid cancelling the callback chain
end

You may also find ActiveRecord::Aggregations::ClassMethods useful. With that you could consolidate your parsing and other logic to another class.