exlibris asked tonight in #rubyonrails how to find the type of a column in the table for a model. I didn’t know this and maybe someone else out there may not know how either. The solution lies within the columnshash method from ActiveRecord:Base which returns a hash containing all kinds of useful information about all the columns in your table such as:

• Precision (integer, notes the precision of the column if it’s decimal-based)
• Primary (boolean, identifies if column is primary key)
• default
• limit (integer, denotes how long the field can be)
• type (symbol, the class type in lowercase)
• name (string, fairly obvious)
• null (boolean, identifies if column can be set to null)
• scale (integer, does something)
• sqltype (returns the sql type of the column)

That final column is the magic attribute we’re looking for. To get to it we access it like Model.columnshash["attribute"].sqltype

Tags: rails

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 14th, 2008 at 10:48 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.