Question

Is it possible to set a display name for a database field, instead of using the auto-generated one?

I’ve got a field bbe_date, and in screens, I am using ‘Best Before’ as the displayed string. I have been through a few views setting this manually, but is there a better way?

This would hopefully take effect wherever the field name is sent to the browser in human-readable form. I’m particularly thinking about validation errors as well (since that’s the bit I haven’t already handled manually!) – my validation code is doing:

record.errors.add :bbe_date, 'not valid'

but unless I specially intercept this, I just see ‘Bbe date not valid’ as the validation error.

Answer 1

You need internationalization (I18N). Yup, even if you just want English.

Modify config/locales/en.yml, and set:

en:
  activerecord:
    attributes:
      your_lower_case_model_name:
        bbe_date: Best Before