ruby on rails - What is the best method of handling currency/money?

Question

I'm working on a very basic shopping cart system.

I have a table items that has a column price of type integer.

I'm having trouble displaying the price value in my views for prices that include both Euros and cents. Am I missing something obvious as far as handling currency in the Rails framework is concerned?

Answer 1

You'll probably want to use a DECIMAL type in your database. In your migration, do something like this:

# precision is the total number of digits
# scale is the number of digits to the right of the decimal point
add_column :items, :price, :decimal, :precision => 8, :scale => 2

In Rails, the :decimal type is returned as BigDecimal, which is great for price calculation.

If you insist on using integers, you will have to manually convert to and from BigDecimals everywhere, which will probably just become a pain.

As pointed out by mcl, to print the price, use:

number_to_currency(price, :unit => "€")
#=> €1,234.01