Has Lookup Extension
===================

What is it for?
===============

Rather than storing a list of things in the database as strings, e.g. Mr, Mrs
and so on, instead we store an integer value that we can look up to get the
true value. This is done for a number of reasons, e.g. it is easy to change the
meaning of a code without having to update large tables, storing an integer is
a lot less space than a string and so on. It is also easy to translate a site
if needed, but this plugin isn't sophisticated enough to support multiple languates.

It does have some disadvantages in that you need to know what the magic number
means and it can make writing queries a pain. The plugin has methods that will
help with this.

For more information look in the file doc/introduction.rtf

This Rails plugin can be installed with the command:

script/plugin install git://github.com/fjfish/has_lookup_extension.git

Francis Fish, Pharmarketeer, released under the MIT license