Question

I’m thinking about a social networking-site. My user-model should have an attribute ‘eyecolor’, which could be set on a view-page with a select-box/dropdownlist.

My question: -> should I make a AR-Model or should I use a global Hash/Constant for the data? Is there a best practice for ‘static-models’?

And how do I associate following without an AR-Model with relations:

u = User.first  u.eyecolor  ==> 1 (not the eyecolor-string!) 

What I need is the eyecolor-string:

u = User.first  u.eyecolor  ==> 'brown' 

Thanks, sorry for my bad english!

Answer 1

You could create a model to handle your eye-color logic:

class EyeColor    COLORS = ['blue','brown','hazel']     attr_accessor :color     # Some logic methods...    def is_brown?      self.color == 'brown'    end  end 

Note: this model is not an Active Record model, but it does create an abstraction the real-world object you are trying to model.

EDIT: I also like this approach as opposed to a global hash, because it gives it organizes your static definition within EyeColor instead of floating around in your program, which makes it clear where this definition is.

<%= select :user, :eye_color, EyeColor::COLORS %> 

EDIT: added question mark to predicate method.