Assigning numerical values

[kostia]

Hello,

there is no automatically parsing on assigning numerical values yet.

Following works in ActiveRecord:

class Company < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_accessible :sort_key
end

c = Company.new
c.attributes = {sort_key: '13'}
c.sort_key #=> 13
c.sort_key.class #=> Fixnum

Which doesn't yet work in `Elastictastic':

class Company
  include Elastictastic::Document
  field :sort_key, type: :integer
end

c = Company.new
c.attributes = {sort_key: '13'}
c.sort_key #=> '13'
c.sort_key.class #=> String

That makes it really unhandy to assign numerical values from request params (for even integer values are submitted as strings).

Would be great if it would work!

Thanx! Kostia

[outoftime]

Good call. Since checking for type and potentially casting the value will impose a performance penalty, my inclination would be to only do this during mass-assignment; presumably if one's application code is assigning a value directly, it will already be passing the correct type. Does this make sense?

Assuming that's the approach, I'll probably factor the mass-assignment logic into a separate module, which would be included in Elastictastic::Document but not the bare-metal Elastictastic::BasicDocument.

[kostia]

Would make totally sense for me. What about boolean attributes? Here's how ActiveRecord behaves:

c = Company.new
c.online = true
c.online.class #=> TrueClass
c.online = '0'
c.online.class #=> FalseClass
c.online = 'foo'
c.online.class #=> FalseClass
c.online = 1
c.online.class #=> TrueClass
c.online = '1'
c.online.class #=> TrueClass

Short: everything except true, "1" and 1 results in false. One exception is nil: assigning nil would result in nil.

[outoftime]

Yep, I was planning on just casting all types to their respective Ruby classes (times would be another big one).

[kostia]

Could you please extract mass-assignment. Then I would write the casting logic.