Does ActiveRecord have support for "Boolean" columns?

Rails
1

Hey all –

I’ve been using enumerable char(1)'s with ‘y’ and ‘n’ values for my
Boolean columns in Rails, but it strikes me there should be a better
way.

How do you setup columns that represent true/false-ness in your
schemas on Rails?

Wondering what kind of standard approaches there are other than me
writing something like

class MyEntity < ActiveRecord::Base
def active
return false unless active==‘y’
true
end
end

– Brendan Baldwin (dot com)

2

I’ve been using enumerable char(1)'s with ‘y’ and ‘n’ values for my
Boolean columns in Rails, but it strikes me there should be a better
way.

Just sharing, cuz I haven’t found a better way than yours – I use
tinyints, set after my migration has run, of course…

3

If you use migrations to create your database, you can specify boolean
columns:

class CreateUsers < ActiveRecord::Migration
def self.up
create_table :users do |table|
table.column :username, :string, :limit => 32, :null => false
table.column :active, :boolean
end
end

def self.down
drop_table :users
end
end

using MySQL for the DB, it creates a TINYINT(1) column, in which is
stores 0
or 1. ActiveRecord then treats it as a boolean.

4

using MySQL for the DB, it creates a TINYINT(1) column, in which is
stores 0
or 1. ActiveRecord then treats it as a boolean.

Well, how ace is that?
Excuse me – I have some migrations editing to do…
Cheers, man!

5

Rails treats an integer field with 0 and 1 as a boolean. The
checkbox_field helpers know what to do with 0 and 1 values, and scaffold
generators create pulldowns for those fields with “True” and “False” on
the labels and 0 and 1 as the return values.

If you use migrations to maintain your database schema, a command like

add_column :salespeople, :has_been_trained, :boolean, :default =>

false

will create the appropriate field type for you. On MySQL this generates
a tinyint(1) in the salespeople table, with a default of 0.

Brendan Baldwin wrote:

Hey all –

I’ve been using enumerable char(1)'s with ‘y’ and ‘n’ values for my
Boolean columns in Rails, but it strikes me there should be a better
way.

How do you setup columns that represent true/false-ness in your
schemas on Rails?

Wondering what kind of standard approaches there are other than me
writing something like

class MyEntity < ActiveRecord::Base
def active
return false unless active==‘y’
true
end
end

– Brendan Baldwin (dot com)

6

I generated my models from postgresql tables with booleans in them.
They
seem to work fine without any extra effort.

7

Each of the database adapters is responsible for determining how to
handle a boolean column in a way that makes sense for their specific
backend. In the case of PostgreSQL and OpenBase this is trivial,
since these database backends have a boolean type column built-in.
For MySQL - as has been pointed out - booleans are usually handled as
tinyint. The MySQL adapter therefore will default to handle tinyint
columns as booleans. However, this behavior can be changed by
setting MysqlAdapter.emulate_booleans = false.

If you define your schema within rails and give the column a type
of :boolean, then the adapter you are using will create a column of
whatever type makes sense for that database, thus achieving (at least
to this extent) database agnosticism. Beautiful. Sorta brings a
tear to your eye, doesn’t it?

-Derrick S.

8

Thats great news about MySQL and TinyInt :slight_smile: I didn’t realize that one.

Thanks for the replies everyone! I think I’m going to start exploring
Migrations now.

–Brendan

9

I don’t think this was mentioned yet. You can place a question mark
after the getter method to inform ActiveRecord that you expect the
attribute to be a boolean. For example:

entity = MyEntity.find(:first)
if entity.active?

do something

end

This is good for a couple reasons:

  1. It follows the ruby standard of placing a question mark after a
    method which returns a boolean.
  2. It converts the column value into a boolean. Example: ‘0’, ‘f’,
    ‘false’, and ‘’ (empty string) all return false. Everything else
    returns true. Unfortunately, it doesn’t recognize “n” as false.

Hope that helps.

Ryan

10

On Apr 7, 2006, at 1:29, Ryan B. wrote:

I don’t think this was mentioned yet. You can place a question mark
after the getter method to inform ActiveRecord that you expect the
attribute to be a boolean. For example:

entity = MyEntity.find(:first)
if entity.active?

do something

end

In addition you can use booleans in find_bys:

entity = MyEntity.find_all_by_active(true) # no SQL here

Since that’s a little tricky I try to avoid hard-coding any boolean-
like literal as one would do with :conditions.

– fxn