Enumbler

Enums are terrific, but they lack integrity. Enumbler! The enum enabler! The goal is to allow one to maintain a true foreign_key database driven relationship that also behaves a little bit like an enum. Best of both worlds? We hope so.

Example

Suppose you have a House and you want to add some colors to the house. You are tempted to use an enum but the Enumbler is calling!

ActiveRecord::Schema.define do
  create_table :colors|t|
    t.string :label, null: false
  end

  create_table :houses|t|
    t.references :color, foreign_key: true, null: false
  end
end

class ApplicationRecord < ActiveRecord::Base
  include Enumbler
  self.abstract_class = true
end

# Our Color has been Enumbled with some basic colors.
class Color < ApplicationRecord
  include Enumbler::Enabler

  enumble :black, 1
  enumble :white, 2
  enumble :dark_brown, 3
  enumble :infinity, 4, label: 'Infinity - and beyond!'
end

# Our House class, it has a color of course!
class House < ApplicationRecord
  enumbled_to :color
end

# This gives you some power:
Color::BLACK           # => 1
Color.black            # => equivalent to Color.find(1)
Color.black.black?     # => true
Color.black.is_black   # => true
Color.white.not_black? # => true

house = House.create!(color: Color.black)
house.black?
house.not_black?

House.color(:black) # => [house]

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'enumbler'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install enumbler

Usage

TODO: Write usage instructions here

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Roadmap

Ideally, we could make this work more like a traditional enum; for example, overriding the .where method by allowing something like: House.where(color: :blue) instead of House.where_color(:blue). But right now am in a rush and not sure how to go about doing that properly.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/linguabee/enumbler.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.