💪 String Enums

We’re all used to writing enums in Rails as

class Comment
	enum visibility: [:private, :public]
end

This is often improved by adding a hash to explicitly map the symbols to their integers like

class Comment
	enum visibility: {
		private: 0,
		public: 1
	}
end

Have you ever looked at the database for this model and asked “what does visibility 1 mean”?

id	visibility	content
1	0	Comments are awesome
2	1	Comments rule!

We go back to the class and we decide to add strings. Now we have the enum reading like.

class Comment
	enum visibility: {
		private: "private",
		public: "public"
	}
end

I find this unnecessarily verbose. Surely we could go back to the original implementation and pass a type argument.

class Comment
	enum visibility: [:private, :public], type: :string
end

This will give us the best of both worlds. A clear syntax and clear database values.