Quick Tip: Use Enums in Rails for Mapped Values

When I worked in a call center, we used to mark cases with different statuses. This allowed upper management to get a handle on where cases stood, what the bottlenecks were and flow of calls. Thankfully it has been a long time since I worked in a call center, but I have pondered how I would accomplish this task with Rails. Thankfully, Rails has a solution known as Enums.

When you are adding statuses to a model, you might be tempted to use strings to set the status. This makes perfect sense because different statuses tend to be named things like 'pending', 'under review', and 'completed'.

However, Rails encourages you to take advantage of Enums to replace these strings with integers. It seems counter-intuitive at first, but it is actually a perfect fit for the problem.

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by William Kennedy via SitePoint