[Rails-core] Gauging interest in an ActiveRecord attributes choices feature

[Christos Zisopoulos]

Seeing as a lot of big changes are going into Rails 3, I thought this might be an opportune time to try and squeeze a small feature into ActiveRecord.

Quick example:

 class User < ActiveRecord::Base
   attr_choices :gender,  { 'm' => "Male", 'f' => 'Female'}
  end

  >> @john = User.new(:name => 'John', :gender => 'm')
  >> @john.gender
  => 'm'
  >> @john.gender_display # generated by the attr_choices macro
  => 'Male'
  >> User.gender_choices # for use in select helpers
  => [["Male", 'm'], ['Female', 'f']]







  <!-- implied gender_choices as second parameter -->
  <%= f.select :gender %>

Cheers!

-christos

[1] http://github.com/christos/attribute_choices/tree

What I am proposing is support for mapping ActiveRecord attribute values to display values for consumption by humans. This facility already exists in at least one more framework that I know of (Django). It is a very common pattern that I often see implemented with custom model methods or by using view helpers. As such, I believe it has a place in the core. I use it as as a plugin[1] with all of my projects but what I wanted to do is ask here if there is any interest in porting it to the core. The plugin already supports I18n and validations of inclusion and I believe it can be used to provide default values to the select helper without explicitly specifying it:

smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature