user profiles lookup-table values as constants (denormalised) or models (normalised)

Question

My site contains user profiles with fields such as hair and eye color.

I have been implementing lookup-table type fields with constants in my user model, ie.

HAIR = %w[shaved black blond brown red grey white bald]

EYES =  %w[black brown blue hazel green grey other]

used in my views with collection_select statements to populate drop down lists. I have done this with constants is to avoid ~10 additional joins each time a user profile is viewed.

<%= f.collection_select :eyes, Profile::EYES, :to_s,  .....

Values are stored as integers in the model, ie. profile.hair = Profile::HAIR.index("red")

Am I at any obvious disadvantage not storing this data in models (eg. Eye model, Hair model) - will this have any great negative impact on search speed if I wish to perform searches based on eye = blue, hair = black for example?

Thanks

Answer 1

It shouldn't have too much impact on search speed for a reasonable amount of data. Although you should make sure you define SQL indexes on hair and eyes columns to make it easier for database to perform a search.

Answer 2

This is a great example of where ActiveHash can be used:

http://github.com/zilkey/active_hash

Let's you create nice in-memory enumeration models to track these things, which will let you create meaningful associations in your models.