Edward Loveall

Naming Conventions for String Identifiers in Rails

Rails has many conventions. It’s one of the reasons I’ve felt so successful with it. I can let go of a lot of decisions and trust the framework to do the right thing. However, it doesn’t (and couldn’t) have a convention for everything. For instance, there’s no convention for what to call an identifying string on a model.

An Example

What is the field you identify a Category by? Here are some choices:

• name
• title
• label

I think title is probably the best choice out of those. However there are many circumstances where name works just as well:

• User
• Business
• Product

Or perhaps label:

• Mailing
• UPC
• RFID

There are many options and it starts to get pretty confusing, especially since there are multiple names that make sense in the same situation. I’ve been on many projects where we’ve used these interchangeably and it’s a mess.

The Convention

So here’s what I’m trying:

• For a person or animal, use name
• For longer text content (often represented by the text column type), use description
• For everything else, use title

This won’t cover everything, of course. Categories can have a name and Products can have a label, but sticking to title instead doesn’t break many grammar rules. And like with everything in Rails, occasional exceptions are just fine.