enum supporting i18n translation with "_text" suffix methods?

[Martin Hong]

I use ActiveRecord enums in my applications and it is common to display human readable text for enum values. For example, I have a class with an enum named sex:

class User < ApplicationRecord
  enum sex: %w(male female)
end

And I need to display translated text "男" for "male" and "女" for "female" in views.

I searched official document and StackOverflow and found no any i18n translation pattern for Rails' enum. I thought enum should be regarded like attributes.

Inspired by enumerize, which provides a mechanism to access enum's human readable text with _text suffix methods. Maybe Rails could also provide similar methods?

I am planing to open a feature PR to support this, but I am looking forward to get more discussion from you.

In my implementation, I will define a i18n pattern for enum and provide a new method like what enumerize did, the below shows my assumption:

# translations
zh-CN:
  activerecord:
    models:
      user: 用户
    attributes:
      user:
        sex: 性别
    enums:
      user:
        sex:
          male: 男
          female: 女

# And now you can get enum text with _text suffix:
User.new(sex: "male").sex_text   # => "男"

# Additionaly and optionally, a new class method:
User.humanized_sexes # => { "male" => "男", "female" => "女" }    # with this, you can conveniently use it to render options for a select control in views