Saving enum from select in Rails 4.1

Question

I am using the enums in Rails 4.1 to keep track of colors of wine.

Wine.rb

class Wine < ActiveRecord::Base
    enum color: [:red, :white, :sparkling]
end

In my view, I generate a select so the user can select a wine with a certain color

f.input :color, :as => :select, :collection => Wine.colors

This generates the following HTML:

<select id="wine_color" name="wine[color]">
  <option value=""></option>
  <option value="0">red</option>
  <option value="1">white</option>
  <option value="2">sparkling</option>
</select>

However, upon submitting the form, I receive an argument error stating '1' is not a valid color. I realize this is because color must equal 1 and not "1".

Is there a way to force Rails to interpret the color as an integer rather than a string?

Answer 1

Alright, so apparently, you shouldn't send the integer value of the enum to be saved. You should send the text value of the enum.

I changed the input to be the following:

f.input :color, :as => :select, :collection => Wine.colors.keys.to_a

Which generated the following HTML:

<select id="wine_color" name="wine[color]">
  <option value=""></option>
  <option value="red">red</option>
  <option value="white">white</option>
  <option value="sparkling">sparkling</option>
</select>

Values went from "0" to "red" and now we're all set.

---

If you're using a regular ol' rails text_field it's:

f.select :color, Wine.colors.keys.to_a

---

If you want to have clean human-readable attributes you can also do:

f.select :color, Wine.colors.keys.map { |w| [w.humanize, w] }