Question

I recently added a new ‘submitted’ attribute to a Comment model in a project I’m working on. In the migration, I created the column like this: add_column :comments, :submitted, :boolean. Note: I’m using MySQL for the database.

I wanted this attribute to have a default value of false, so I added a before_create method as such:

before_create :default_values

def default_values
  self.submitted = false
end

This seemed correct to me, but whenever I would try and add a new comment, nothing would happen and the console would show errors. My create method is done via AJAX, and the controller correctly processed the method by JS, but for some reason it was defaulting to the format html and trying to redirect to a different page.

After a bit of playing around, I changed my default_values method to look like this:

def default_values
  self.submitted = 0
end

Everything worked fine after that. Does this have something to do with Rails using tinyint for a boolean field in the database? I would have thought it would be smart enough to make the conversion between false/true and 1/0.

Interesting to note, I tried to create a new comment through the console and was able to set my submitted attribute to false with no issues. Is there a reason why I have to use an integer instead of a true/false value?

Answer 1

Add default value to your migration:

add_column :comments, :submitted, :boolean, :default => false