Ruby on Rails
HowtoUseBooleanColumns

Columns which are either boolean or tinyint(1) are recognised as booleans by ActiveRecord. So, if you have a table “people” and a column “rocks tinyint(1)”, you can say:

person = People.find(1)
person.rocks = true

However, person.rocks will return an integer, and Ruby thinks that 0 is true. If you want to test for truth, use person.rocks?, like this view example:

<% if person.rocks? %>
You rock, dude!
<% end %>

Thanks to Ulysses for pointing this out.

—AlisdairMcDiarmid

ActiveRecord also gives you a .toggle method to switch the value back and forth.

@person.toggle :rocks

The boolean type is nonstandard and, in postgresql 7.4 at least, the db will give an error if you try to put an int instead of a bool in. But Rails assumes boolean is the same as a tinyint(1), so it will often convert bools to ints behind your back. For instance, the following fixture will fail:

a_fixture:
  int_col: 1
  bool_col: true

Because when the test framework is populating the database, both int_col and bool_col will have been converted to 1. You can prevent bool_col from being converted by using:

a_fixture:
  int_col: 1
  bool_col: "true" 

But I assume that will fail for tinyint(1) cols.

—JoeNotCharles?

I use the following for mysq/postgresql compatibility:

a_fixture:
  bool_col: '1'

Postgresql allows ‘1’ and ‘0’ for bool values, as well as true/false.

—technoweenie

See also: http://www.bigbold.com/snippets/posts/show/2086

category:Howto