Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@avdi
Created January 11, 2012 23:58
Show Gist options
  • Star 0 You must be signed in to star a gist
  • Fork 0 You must be signed in to fork a gist
  • Save avdi/1597569 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save avdi/1597569 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Setting booleans in AR
# When params come back from a form, checked boxes come back as 'field_name' => "on".
# So we can use that to update attributes, right?
model.field_name # => false
model.update_attribute(:field_name, "on")
model.field_name # => false
# WTF?
@scottharvey
Copy link

These are the only two that seem to work for me

model.update_attribute(:field_name, "1")
model.update_attribute(:field_name, true)

@alassek
Copy link

alassek commented Jan 12, 2012

The best you could probably do here is overload model#field_name= to convert 'on' to true.

Or it might be possible to monkeypatch AR.

@radar
Copy link

radar commented Jan 12, 2012

Confirm what @scottharvey says, "on" won't work. "1", 1, 0, "0", true, "true", false and "false" are the only values that I think Rails supports. There may also be support for 't' and 'f'.

@nickhoffman
Copy link

As @scottharvey said, "1" and true are what I've used in the past, though 1 should also work.

Also, "field_name" => "on" seems weird to me. Checkboxes usually result in "field_name" => "1".

@clifton
Copy link

clifton commented Jan 12, 2012

These fields, in the mysql[2] adapter are saved as TINYINTs. So if you were doing a query you would say

select * from models where field_name = 1

So, aside from just true and false rails would need to know what other strings to use for truthy/falsey values.

>> "true".true?
=> true
>> "on".true?
=> false

@clifton
Copy link

clifton commented Jan 12, 2012

Also,

>> model.update_attribute :boolean, "true"
=> true
>> model.boolean
=> true

@avdi
Copy link
Author

avdi commented Jan 12, 2012

So it turns out that the jQuery default value for checked boxes is "on".

The list of values ActiveRecord considers "truthy" for setting boolean attributes is: [true, 1, '1', 't', 'T', 'true', 'TRUE']

!@&%.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment