From: Josh Cheek <josh.cheek@...>
Date: 2010-04-15T12:24:20+09:00
Subject: Re: Is there a way to make class and object constants in Ruby?

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On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 8:40 PM, Thomas Volkmar Worm <tvw@s4r.de> wrote:

> Am Wed, 14 Apr 2010 20:00:54 -0500 schrieb Xeno Campanoli:
>
> > I am reading up in other areas, and it occurs to me much of the items I
> > have as class and object variables really should be constants, but
> > ideally still in the class or object context.  Is there a way to do
> > this?
> >
> > xc
>
> In class context you could do:
>
> class MyClass
>
>  MYCONSTANT=6
>
>  def initialize
>    puts MYCONSTANT
>  end
>
> end
>
>
> But I wonder, whether it makes sense at all to have constants at object
> level. This sounds weird to me.
>
> Thomas
>
>
I do for things that don't (or shouldn't) change. For example, I'm working
on a Rails project where the admin can assign a level of trust to a user
such that they can post images directly to the main page from Twitter. The
database doesn't inherently support enumerated types, so the attribute is an
integer, then I have class level constants that map those values to their
meanings, and a set of methods that allow you to get booleans back when
asking if that user is able to do that authorized thing, and they are
embedded into named scopes so that I can pull all users who have this
authorization level, or that authorization level, and so forth. So I just
store a single integer in the database, but my application interprets it the
same across every instance.

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