Maybe So

Ever get annoyed that ActiveRecord blows up if you set a boolean column to nil? Have you ever wanted to allow custom "truthy" values for booleans rather than just true, false, 0, and 1? Wish you could call to_bool on random objects and have it return something reasonable?

Maybe So handles this for you!

Tested on Ruby 2.x (MRI)

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'maybe_so'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install maybe_so

Let's say you have an ActiveRecord attribute called hidden that you want to only be 0 or 1, never nil.

add_column :products, :hidden, :boolean, default: false, null: false

Add the boolean_attribute class method on your class.

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
  boolean_attribute :hidden
end

By default, Maybe So accepts the following case insensitive values as true. Everything else is false. You can override these values with the truthy_values option (see below).

true, "true", "Y", "Yes", 1, "1", "T"

class Product
  include ActiveModel::Model

  boolean_attribute :hidden
end

boolean_attributes accepts an options hash for the following:

• truthy_values: array of values (will be coerced into strings when checking) to be considered truthy
• skip_validator: this will omit adding the validates_inclusion_of to ensure records are not valid unless they are set to true or false. Note it does not validate presence. If you want that, you'll need to add a separate validation.

Example custom configuration:

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
  boolean_attribute :hidden, truthy_values: ["Si"], skip_validator: true
end

String, Integer, TrueClass, FalseClass, NilClass all have #to_bool added.

"Yes".to_bool # Uses the same truthy values as shown above
# => true

"zing".to_bool
# => false

"1".to_bool
# => true

1.to_bool
# => true

42.to_bool
# => false

true.to_bool
# => true

false.to_bool
# => false

nil.to_bool
# => false

Copyright (c) 2017 James Miller and Tanner Mares