Do I go by ID or by Label while programming?

Question

Suppose I have a table "Progress" with two columns. One column is ID which is identity. Another column is Progress_Label

ID Progress_Label

1 Submitted

2 Approved by user

3 Rejected by leadership

4 Cancelled

5 Completed

What is the best programming practice, should I go by ID or by label? In my stored procedures, functions, or in programming code methods etc should I search records by the ID = 3 for example or should I type "Where progress_lable is Rejected by leadership" ?

If somebody would want to edit the labels, all the code would stop working if I go by the label?

At the same type if I type the label, code looks more understandable since it says right in the code what is it we are looking for?

Are there any articles regarding this?

Answer 1

Use the ID.

The label does change, sometimes, and for human-readable code you can just use things like enums:

enum DocumentProgress
{
    Submitted = 1,
    Approved by user = 2,
    Rejected by leadership = 3,
    Cancelled = 4,
    Completed = 5
}

Which might be used like this:

Item.Progress = DocumentProgress.Submitted;

Answer 2

Create a method called GetProgressIdByLabel so you can do something like

int progressId = GetProgressIdByLabel("Submitted")

This reads nicely, your method should throw an exception if someone uses a label that doesn't exist