Using question mark character in Rails/ActiveRecord column name

Question

In keeping with Ruby\'s idiom of using a question mark in boolean methods (e.g. person.is_smart?), I\'d like to do the same for an ActiveRecord field in Rails:

Answer 1

One "gotcha" to be aware of if you happen to use :enum in your model, since this stores the value as an integer. The question mark attr method provided by active record expects to evaluate 0 or 1 as false / true respectively in the database. For example:

class Person
  enum mood: ['happy', 'sad', 'bored']
end

p = Person.new(mood: 'happy') # this would store mood as 0 in db
p.mood? #=> false

p.mood = 'sad' # saves as 1 in db
p.mood? #=> true

p.mood = 'bored' # saves as 2 in db
p.mood? #=> true

to see how this method works, see rails source