Does your Rails application have lots of little tables for keeping track of things like genders, states, colors or other enum-like data?

Way back when, when I was learning database development, a mentor of mine showed me a technique that he liked to use to consolidate similar enum-esque database tables (tables with just an ID and a string).

Introducing AuxCodes

AuxCodes is an ActiveRecord-based gem that makes it easy to store enum-like data in your applications. It gives you …

• a way to maintain all of this data in a YAML file
• auto-generated ActiveRecord classes for these categories, eg. Gender or Color
• a simple DSL for accessing your enum data, eg. Gender.female
• a way to store additional meta data for any of your categories’ codes, eg. Gender.female.abbreviation

see http://github.com/remi/aux_codes or watch the screencast!

checkout AuxCodes on Rails for part II of the screencast & for howto use AuxCodes in your Rails applications.

aux_codes inspired by Walter Turner