Rails core - Sep 2009 - Gauging interest in an ActiveRecord attributes choices feature

Seeing as a lot of big changes are going into Rails 3, I thought this  
might be an opportune time to try and squeeze a small feature into  
ActiveRecord.

What I am proposing is support for mapping ActiveRecord attribute  
values to display values for consumption by humans.

Quick example:

  class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    attr_choices :gender,  { ''m'' => "Male",
''f'' => ''Female''}
   end

   >> @john = User.new(:name => ''John'', :gender =>
''m'')
   >> @john.gender
   => ''m''
   >> @john.gender_display # generated by the attr_choices macro
   => ''Male''
   >> User.gender_choices # for use in select helpers
   => [["Male", ''m''],
[''Female'', ''f'']]

This facility already exists in at least one more framework that I  
know of (Django). It is a very common pattern that I often see  
implemented with custom model methods or by using view helpers. As  
such, I believe it has a place in the core.

I use it as as a plugin[1] with all of my projects but what I wanted  
to do is ask here if there is any interest in porting it to the core.

The plugin already supports I18n and validations of inclusion and I  
believe it can be used to provide default values to the select helper  
without explicitly specifying it:

   <!-- implied gender_choices as second parameter -->
   <%= f.select :gender %>

Cheers!

-christos

[1] http://github.com/christos/attribute_choices/tree