Working With Rails

Model Formatter

Location: United States, Chicago, IL

== Overview The ModelFormatter module allows you to easily handle fields that need to be formatted or stripped of formatting as they are set or retrieved from the database. You can designate one or more of your columns as “formatted columns” like in this example:

class Widget < ActiveRecord::Base
  # Set an integer field as a symbol
  format_column :some_integer, :as => :integer
end

1. Specify the type as a class format_column :sales_tax, :as => Formatters::FormatCurrency format_column :sales_tax, :as => Formatters::FormatCurrency.new(:precision => 4)

1. Change the prefix of the generated methods and specify type as a symbol format_column :sales_tax, :prefix => ‘fmt_’, :as => :currency, :options => {:precision => 4}

1. Use specific procedures to convert the data from and to the target format_column :area, :from => Proc.new {|value, options| number_with_delimiter sprintf(‘%2d’, value)}, :to => Proc.new {|str, options| str.gsub(/,/, ’’)}

1. Use a block to define the formatter methods format_column :sales_tax do def from(value, options = {}) number_to_currency value end def to(str, options = {}) str.gsub(/[\$,]/, ’’) end end

...

The methods of this module are automatically included into ActiveRecord::Base as class methods, so that you can use them in your models.

Documentation For more detailed documentation, create the rdocs with the following command:

rake rdoc

Running Unit Tests By default, the ModelFormatter plugin uses the mysql test database, running on localhost. To run the tests, enter the following:

rake

Bugs & Feedback Please file a bug report at http://bfolkens.lighthouseapp.com/projects/14691-model-formatter Credits Sebastian Kanthak’s file_column plugin – used for ideas and best practices.

NOTE: This description has been extracted from the Plugin README and so the formatting may need updating to make browser friendly

Homepage: http://brad.folkens.com/formatting-data-in-rails-models