Ruby on Rails: How to store form data

Question

I have a state field that stores the value as 2 characters. For example, Alabama is saved as AL, Alaska is saved as AK, Arizona is saved as AZ, etc. In the show.html.erb, how do I display the long name for the state such as Alabama instead of just showing AL? Is this possible or should I just store the long name in the database such as Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, etc?

Answer 1

Write a method that would output long name of a stateand call it in show.html.erb

some_model.rb:

SomeModel < ActiveRecord::Base
  STATE_CODES = {
    "AL": "Alabama", "AK": "Alaska",
    # add remaining 50
  }
  def state_human_name
    STATE_CODES[self.state]
  end

show.html.erb:

<%= record.state_human_name %>

EDIT: It does not help to store full names of states in your database -- you'll need short forms at least somewhere and therefore would need to add mapping between short and long forms anyway.

Answer 2

Is there a reason for using the 2 letter codes (e.g. a legacy database)? If not I would stick to the usual ActiveRecord idiom and have a separate "states" table linked by id. If you need the 2 letter code for display purposes, printing address labels or whatever then add add a 'state_code' attribute to the states table but don't use it as a primary key.

Answer 3

In response to the comment "I was storing the STATE_CODES as "Alabama" => "AL" instead of "AL" => "Alabama" If I do it your way, the option value in my form field would appear as AL. How do I make it show up as Alabama instead? What would the select tag look like? – Max (12 hours ago)"

When passing STATE_CODES to the options method or select method, use STATE_CODES.invert, which switches keys and values.

Answer 4

Tilendor, I notice that if I use STATE_CODES.invert, the drop-down menu selection would get out of order. For example, the first five lines of my option list is shown below:

New Hampshire Ohio Colorado Minnesota Alabama ...

In my STATES_CODES hash, I have the following listed in the order below:

"AL" => "Alabama", "AK" => "Alaska", "AZ" => "Arizona", "AR" => "Arkansas", "CA" => "California", ...

Is there a way to have the options listed in the form in the same order as the STATES_CODES? Maybe sort them alphabetically?

Answer 5

I put this in a comment, but I've decided it's sufficiently different that it warrants an answer.

When you're deciding where to keep your state map, consider whether you'll ever need to ship things to Canada, or further afield. If so, it's worth the effort to set up a states table, linked to a countries table.

And anyway, if your data rarely changes, it's less issue-prone to put it in the database, because code changes far more often. More frequent changes = more opportunities to mess it up. Plus, it's then trivial to sort as you like.

class State < ActiveRecord::Base
  def self.get_states
    @@states || State.find(:all, 
                           :include => :country, 
                           :order => 'countries.name, long_name')
  end
end