Question

I have a rails app I am working on that allows users to create a schedule. In doing so, they should be able to select on which days of the week an event occurs. The way I was planning on doing this in a form was a checkbox next to every, weekday, like so:

<%= f.check_box :monday %> <%= f.label :monday %>
<%= f.check_box :tuesday %> <%= f.label :tuesday %>
<%= f.check_box :wednesday %> <%= f.label :wednesday %>

etc…

However, It occured to me that this probably isn’t a very efficient way of handling this, storing each date as a boolean value in the database. It will be very difficult to display the dates in the ‘show’ view; I’ll have to do something like

Event Dates:
<% if @event.monday? %>
  Monday
<% end %>
<% if @event.tuesday? %>
  Tuesday
<% end %>
<% if @event.wednesday? %>
  Wednesday
<% end %>

Which seems less than ideal to me.

My other idea would be to just create one string column in the database that holds all of the event dates, using attr_accesors and a model method to create the string after_create. However, in this case, how will users be able to edit the Event?

It got me thinking, there must be some sort of best practice here that I don’t know about (I’ve never tried to create something with this type of structure before).

Any advice?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Don’t do this:

My other idea would be to just create one string column in the database that holds all of the event dates, using attr_accesors and a model method to create the string after_create.

That sort of thing will just cause problems like making per-day queries a horrific ugly mess; how would you, for example, count how many events are available on Monday if you stored your days mashed into a single column?

Instead, keep your seven booleans and add a simple convenience method to your model that returns the days in some more convenient format. Something like this perhaps:

def days
  Date::DAYNAMES.map { |d| read_attribute(d.downcase) }
end

and then you can simply iterate over @event.days in your view and map the day numbers to names:

<% @event.days.each_with_index do |on_day, i| %>
  <% if on_day %>
    <%= Date::DAYNAMES[i] %>
  <% end %>
<% end %>

The specific details of the days method and how you deal with it in your ERB will, of course, depend on your specific circumstances.