Use hashes ActiveRecord:Enum

Did you know you can use Hash instead of Array to define enum’s in ActiveRecord? Well I recently did and it’s pretty rad.

# So instead of
class Post < ApplicationRecord
  enum status %w(draft published)
end

# You can use
class Post < ApplicationRecord
  enum status { draft: "draft", published: "published" }
end

You might ask “why? that looks worse”. But when you look into the database

# using array
   id   | status
--------+----------
    1   |        1
    2   |        0
    3   |        1

# using hash
   id   | status
--------+-----------
    1   | published
    2   | draft
    3   | published

Much nicer yeah?

There is some performance overhead as integer comparison is faster then varchar in most databases but with well selected indexes it shouldn’t give you too much grief.

Finally, when your model needs a new state adding a new value to the enum is more explicit.

class Post < ApplicationRecord
  enum status {
    draft: "draft",
    reviewing: "reviewing",
    published: "published"
  }
end

Removing the potential bug where changing the order of an enum changes the meaning of the data backing it.