what is the right way to model status values as an association in Rails?

Question

I have a model called Contacts.

Contacts can have different status "bad, positive, wrong..."

These status may need to be changed over time, but across all contacts, they are the same options.

Should I model it this way:

Contacts.rb

belongs_to :status_contact

StatusContacts.rb
has_many :contacts

Then I manually populate the types of status in the table?

I then want to use Ajax to click a button corresponding to a value to update the value for Contacts.

Answer 1

It looks like you're trying to ensure that the values for your status are always going to restricted to a set of possible answers of your choosing. If that's all you're trying to do, there's no special need for a separate table. You can use the magic of ActiveRecord validations instead here.

First, create a string database column for Contact called :status.

Then you can use a validation to ensure that the values are limited to the ones you want. In Rails 3, you can do it like this:

validate :status, :inclusion => { :in => %w( bad positive wrong ) }

(If you're using Rails 2, use #validates_inclusion_of instead.)

In ActiveRecord, validations check that the object's values are valid before saving; it refuses to persist the object into the database until all validations pass.

Answer 2

Your naming strikes me as a little weird—ContactStatus sounds a little nicer to me—but I see this as being the general idea to achieve what you want.

Answer 3

No clear answer yet --- I think I need to use the table because it would allow the users to add and modify the types of status used across their application.