I wrote up this detailed description of the issues I'm having with Rails Enums:
Enums and Queries in Rails 4.1, and Understanding Ruby <http://www.railsonmaui.com/blog/2014/10/22/enums-and-queries-in-rails-4-dot-1/> At the bottom of the article, I post my recommendation: Recommendations to the Rails Core Team In response to this issue, I submitted this github issue: Rails where query should see value is an enum and convert a string #17226 <https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/17226> 1. @Bounga and @rafaelfranca on Github suggest that we can’t automatically convert enum string values in queries. I think that is true for converting cases of a ? or a named param, but I suspect that a quick map lookup to see that the attribute is an enum, and a string is passed, and then converting the string value to an integer is the right thing to do for 2 reasons: 1. This is the sort of “magic” that I expect from Rails. 2. Existing methods find_or_initialize_by and find_or_create_by will result in obscure bugs when string params are passed for enums. However, it’s worth considering if all default accessor methods (setters) should be consistently be called for purposes of passing values in a map to such methods. I would venture that Rails enums are some Rails provided magic, and thus they should have a special case. If this shouldn’t go into Rails, then possibly a gem extension could provide a method like Model.where_with_enum which would convert a String into the proper numerical value for the enum. I’m not a huge fan of the generated Model scopes for enums, as *I like to see what database field is being queried against.* 2. Aside from putting automatic conversion of the enum hash attributes, I recommend we change the automatic conversion of Strings to integers to use the stricter Integer(some_string) rather than some_string.to_i. The difference is considerable, String#to_i is extremely permissive. Try it in a console. With the to_i method, any number characters at the beginning of the String are converted to an Integer. If the first character is not a number, *0 is returned*, which is almost certainly a default enum value. Thus, this simple change would make it *extremely* clear when an enum string is improperly used. I would guess that this would make some existing code crash, but in all circumstances for a valid reason. As to whether this change should be done for all integer attributes is a different discussion, as that could have backwards compatibility ramifications. This change would require changing the tests in ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::TypesTest <https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/activerecord/test/cases/types_test.rb>. For example, this test: 1 assert_equal 0, type.type_cast_from_user('bad') would change to throw an exception, unless the cases are restricted to using Integer.new() for enums. It is inconsistent that some type conversions throw exceptions, such as converting a symbol to an integer. Whether or not they should is much larger issue. In the case of enums, *I definitely believe that proper enum string value should not silently convert to zero every time.* -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Core" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rubyonrails-core+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-core@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
