Question

rails g migration add_anonymous_to_message anonymous:???

If I were adding a title etc to a message then I would put rails g migration add_title_to_message title:string but if :anonymous is a check box in the message submit form how do I add it to the database so that there are only two options: box checked=anonymous and box unchecked=username displayed?

Thanks

Answer 1

Are you sure you need another database column? What you could do is

• Add a column username:string which allows NULL values (default)
• Validate the model so that if anonymous is unchecked, saving a blank username is invalid
• Validate the model so that if anonymous is checked, the username is always saved as blank (nil), regardless of the form value
• When you check later on whether or not a message is anonymous you simply check for message.username.nil?

If for some reason you do need a separate DB column for anonymous, it should look like this:

rails g migration add_anonymous_to_message anonymous:boolean

Although not all RDBMS support boolean columns (MySQL doesn’t), Rails takes care of this by generating a TINYINT(1) or similar column when you specify boolean, which is set to either 0 or 1.