Decimals are being converted to Bigdecimals!!!!!

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi all,

I'm working on a financial app, and have set up some columns in my tables as decimals with precision => 8 and scale => 2. My migration looks like:

    change_column :lineitems, :price, :decimal, :precision => 8, :scale => 2     change_column :payments, :amount, :decimal, :precision => 8, :scale => 2

I've run the migration and restarted the server. I also looked at the Mysql tables to verify that the migration ran correctly, and the fields look like they're set up right ( DECIMAL(8,2) ).

The problem is that when I access these columns in the console, they show up as Bigdecimal and it's messing up my calculations. Here's what it looks like from the rails console:

Lineitem.find(34).price

=> #<BigDecimal:31e4c74,'0.3E4',4(12)>

Payment.find(23).amount

=> #<BigDecimal:31b8480,'0.4125E4',4(12)>

What's going on here? How do I get Rails to recognize that these are decimal/currency amounts???

2

Hi all,

I'm working on a financial app, and have set up some columns in my tables as decimals with precision => 8 and scale => 2. My migration looks like:

    change_column :lineitems, :price, :decimal, :precision => 8, :scale => 2     change_column :payments, :amount, :decimal, :precision => 8, :scale => 2

I've run the migration and restarted the server. I also looked at the Mysql tables to verify that the migration ran correctly, and the fields look like they're set up right ( DECIMAL(8,2) ).

The problem is that when I access these columns in the console, they show up as Bigdecimal and it's messing up my calculations. Here's what it looks like from the rails console:

>> Lineitem.find(34).price => #<BigDecimal:31e4c74,'0.3E4',4(12)> >> Payment.find(23).amount => #<BigDecimal:31b8480,'0.4125E4',4(12)>

What's going on here? How do I get Rails to recognize that these are decimal/currency amounts???

BigDecimal is just the Ruby class which represents decimal fixed point numbers.

How is it "messing up your calculations?"

b = BigDecimal.new("100", 2)

=> #<BigDecimal:13f4e6c,'0.1E3',4(8)>

b.to_s

=> "100.0"

b + 1

=> #<BigDecimal:13f0b8c,'0.101E3',4(12)>

(b + 1).to_s

=> "101.0"