Question

i have im my rails app model which has few options (no more than 10 i think).
Something like Product – Category, where product can be part of 1 or many categories.
But i think i have too few categories to engage fully fledged many-to-many construct.
Moreover the list of categroies is predefined and will almost never change.

I think from sql side this could look like string field categories with such content:"Fruits|Vegetables|..."

Maybe someone know preexisting gem for such functionality, or maybe it is no real advantage doing so and i should choose standart many-to-many ?

I checked acts-as-taggable-on plugin, but it is i think fits not very well for this task.

Enum gems like enumerize i think fit just best, but they are allow only single single value to be choosen.

Answer 1

Currently came out with following combination:

This gem:
https://github.com/pboling/flag_shih_tzu

In model:

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
  KINDS =  { 1 => :fruit, 2 => :vegetable }
  include FlagShihTzu
  attr_accessible *KINDS.values
  as_flags KINDS

Then in view (haml):

    =form_for [@product] do |f|
      -Product::KINDS.each do |k, v|
        =f.check_box v
        =f.label v

UPDATE:

Yet another gem adressing this problem: https://github.com/joelmoss/bitmask_attributes