Tinyint and select tag with Rails in gender selection

Question

In the database, I store 0 if gender is female and 1 if gender is male.

I have a form field like this:

<%= myobject.select(:gender, options_for_select([['Male', 1], ['Female', 0]]), {:prompt => 'Select Gender'})%>

Which works well when:

The field doesn't exist in the object it has selected the 'Select Gender' (no value) option.
The field is male in the database it has selected the Male option

However, if the field is Female it shows the Select Gender option. I believe is because the 0 in the database is thought as false when is retrieved (because Rails assumes 0 in Mysql is false) and therefore in the select it thinks it has to prompt the non value text.

How should I deal with this situation assuming I can't touch the database structure.

AR considers tinyint to mean boolean for MySQL, that's where the 1 and 0 mangling comes from. Can you change your schema? — mu is too short
I bet I can... I wast just wondering if there was a solution for this case... — Nobita

TomDunning TomDunning · Accepted Answer · 2012-02-16T01:39:16

moved this to an answer instead of a comment as it is actually an optional way of doing it if you can't change the schema.

If you can change it: string, :length => 1 # (M/F)

otherwise you can use a converter like this:

myobject.rb

def m_f
  myobject.gender ? 'M' : 'F'
end

attr_accessor :gender_string


before_save :convert_gender
def convert_gender
  self.gender = myobject.gender_string == 'M' ? 1 : 0
end

_form.html.erb

<%= myobject.select(:gender_string, options_for_select([['Male', 'M'], ['Female', 'F']]), {:prompt => 'Select Gender', :selected => myobject.m_f})%>

you'll then need to convert the data back again once the form is submitted.

Tinyint and select tag with Rails in gender selection

1 Answers