README

Enumerations Mixin
Copyright (c) 2005 Trevor Squires
Released under the MIT License.  See the LICENSE file for more details.

What is this?:

The enumerations mixin allows you to treat instances of your
ActiveRecord models as though they were an enumeration of values.

At it's most basic level, it allows you to say things along the lines of:

booking = Booking.new(:status => BookingStatus[:provisional])
booking.update_attribute(:status, BookingStatus[:confirmed])

Booking.find :first, 
						 :conditions => ['status_id = ?', BookingStatus[:provisional].id]

BookingStatus.all.collect {|status|, [status.name, status.id]}

See "How to use it" below for more information.

Package Contents:

This package adds two mixins and a helper to Rails' ActiveRecord:

acts_as_enumerated provides capabilities to treat your model and
its records as an enumeration. At a minimum, the database table for
an acts_as_enumerated must contain an 'id' column and a 'name'
column.  All instances for the acts_as_enumerated model are cached
in memory.

has_enumerated adds methods to your ActiveRecord model for setting
and retrieving enumerated values using an associated acts_as_enumerated
model.

There is also an ActiveRecord::VirtualEnumerations helper module
to create 'virtual' acts_as_enumerated models which helps to avoid
cluttering up your models directory with acts_as_enumerated classes.

How to use it:

* acts_as_enumerated

class BookingStatus < ActiveRecord::Base
acts_as_enumerated  :conditions => 'optional_sql_conditions', 
                    :order => 'optional_sql_orderby',
                    :on_lookup_failure => :optional_class_method
end

With that, your BookingStatus class will have the following methods defined:

* BookingStatus[arg] : lookup the BookingStatus instance for arg.
The arg value can be a 'string' or a :symbol, in which case the
lookup will be against the BookingStatus.name field.  Alternatively
arg can be a Fixnum, in which case the lookup will be against the
BookingStatus.id field.

The :on_lookup_failure option specifies the name of a class method
to invoke when the [] method is unable to locate a BookingStatus
record for arg.  The defeault is the built-in :enforce_strict_literals
which causes an exception to be raised when no record is found and
the arg is a Fixnum or Symbol, otherwise it returns nil.  There are
also built-ins for :enforce_strict (raise and exception regardless
of the type for arg) and :enforce_none which just returns nil.

The whole point of the :on_lookup_failure option is that I'm pretty
opinionated that a) if the value can't be looked-up for a :symbol
that I've passed, it's probably a typo so I want a *big* hint that
something is wrong and b) it's likely that my opinion isn't shared
by everyone so it should be configurable.

* BookingStatus.all : returns an array of all BookingStatus records
that match the :conditions specified in acts_as_enumerated, in the
order specified by :order.

NOTE: acts_as_enumerated records are considered immutable.  By
default you cannot create/alter/destroy instances because they are
cached in memory.  Because of Rails' process-based model it is not
safe to allow updating acts_as_enumerated records as the caches
will get out of sync.

However, one instance where updating the models *should* be allowed
is if you are using ActiveRecord Migrations.

Using the above example you would do the following:

BookingStatus.enumeration_model_updates_permitted = true
BookingStatus.create(:name => 'newname')

* has_enumerated

First of all, note that you *could* specify the relationship
to an acts_as_enumerated class using the belongs_to association.
However, has_enumerated is preferable because you aren't really
associated to the enumerated value, you are *aggregating* it.
As such, the has_enumerated macro behaves more like an aggregation
than an association.

class Booking < ActiveRecord::Base
has_enumerated  :status, :class_name => 'BookingStatus',
                :foreign_key => 'status_id', 
                :on_lookup_failure => :optional_instance_method
end

By default, the foreign key is interpreted to be the name of your
has_enumerated field (in this case 'status') plus '_id'.  Additionally,
the default value for :class_name is the camel-ized version of the
name for your has_enumerated field.  :on_lookup_failure is explained
below.

With that, your Booking class will have the following methods defined:

* status : returns the BookingStatus with an id that matches the
value in the Booking.status_id.

* status= : sets the value for Booking.status_id using the id of
the BookingStatus instance passed as an argument.  As a short-hand,
you can also pass it the 'name' of a BookingStatus instance, either
as a 'string' or :symbol.

I.e. mybooking.status = :confirmed or mybooking.update_attribute(:status,
:confirmed)

The :on_lookup_failure option in has_enumerated is there because
(again) I'm opinionated about what should happen.  By default, if
booking.status_id contains an id that isn't a valid BookingStatus.id
I just want booking.status to return nil rather than throw an
exception.  This ensures I can edit my Booking instances without
having to put rescue blocks around all my booking.status calls.
However, if I call booking.status = :bogus I want noisy hints about
the bug.

Of course, you may not agree with that in which case you can specify
an *instance* method to be called in the case of a lookup failure.
The method signature is as follows:

your_lookup_handler(operation, name, name_foreign_key, 
										acts_enumerated_class_name, lookup_value)

The 'operation' arg will be either :read or :write.  In the case
of :read you are expected to return something or raise an exception,
while in the case of a :write you don't have to return anything.

Note that there's enough information in the method signature that
you can specify one method to handle all lookup failures for all
has_enumerated fields if you happen to have more than one defined
in your model.

* ActiveRecord::VirtualEnumerations

For the most part, your acts_as_enumerated classes will do nothing
more than just act as enumerated.  

In that case there isn't much point cluttering up your models
directory with those class files.  You can use
ActiveRecord::VirtualEnumerations to reduce that clutter.

Copy virtual_enumerations_sample.rb to
RAILS_ROOT/config/virtual_enumerations.rb and configure it accordingly.

See virtual_enumerations_sample.rb in this directory for a full
description.