Question

I thought it would be good to populate a status field in an activeRecord table using constants. However, when it comes to checking if this status has a particular status, I’m having trouble.

If I do the following,

e = Mytable.new
e.status = :cancelled
e.save

then refind the record and try and compare my status to the symbol, the check fails. I have some output from the console to show this.

irb(main):060:0> e.status.eql?("cancelled")
=> true
irb(main):061:0> e.status.eql?(:cancelled)
=> false
irb(main):062:0> e.status == :cancelled
=> false
irb(main):063:0> e.status == "cancelled"
=> true
irb(main):064:0> e.status == :cancelled.to_s
=> true

Is there a better way of holding a status in a record? Is there a way of testing if a current field value is equal to the :symbol without converting the :symbol to a string? I’m thinking there may be an operator I’m not aware of.

Answer 1

At the request of ecoologic, here is my comment as an answer:

ecoologic has a good solution for you, but I would recommend steering away from this and making a class with constants in it. That you can do things like e.status = Statuses::CANCELLED. And internally that could be a string and it doesn’t matter. You’re still using constants, and it will error out if that constant doesn’t exist, and it’s cleaner that way.