A robust, opinionated state machine library for Ruby that provides an audit trail and data integrity.
Statesman is a state machine library for Ruby designed to provide a robust audit trail and data integrity. It solves the problem of managing complex state transitions in applications by decoupling state logic from models and allowing transitions to be persisted with metadata. Unlike simpler state machine libraries, it focuses on ensuring every state change is recorded and protected against race conditions.
Ruby developers building applications with complex stateful models, such as e-commerce orders, workflow systems, or any domain requiring auditable state transitions. It's particularly suited for teams needing strong data integrity and historical tracking.
Developers choose Statesman for its strong emphasis on audit trails and database-level integrity, offering a more robust solution than basic state machine gems. Its decoupled design allows flexible composition with multiple models, and built-in support for ActiveRecord integration simplifies implementation in Rails applications.
A statesmanlike state machine library.
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Transitions are persistable objects with JSON metadata, enabling a complete history of state changes as described in the README's emphasis on auditability.
Uses database indices for transaction duplication protection at the database level, ensuring data integrity against race conditions.
Supports guards, before_transition, after_transition, and failure callbacks with fine-grained control, including after_commit options for safe side-effects.
Includes adapters and scopes like Model.in_state for easy filtering and querying in Rails applications, simplifying model-level state management.
Requires defining separate state machine and transition model classes, adding overhead compared to gems that embed state logic directly in models.
Full persistence features rely on the ActiveRecord adapter, limiting suitability for non-Rails or alternative ORM projects without third-party extensions.
The decoupled design, while promoting clean code, introduces a learning curve and may be overkill for applications with straightforward state needs.