---
title: Adding a Categories feature
slug: adding-a-categories-feature
published_at: 2021-03-03 18:00:07 +0000
updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:27 +0000
summary: 
description: This is more of a basic Rails CRUD episode where we upgrade from a simple text subtitle to a video category. This makes managing a group of videos in a specific category a bit easier. We&#39;ll manage colors in the category rather than a subtitle.  Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/video_automation Twitter: https://twitter.com/cjav_dev Feedback: https://forms.gle/Q31hhjJGsMrvY4mL6  It turns out there&#39;s a really excellent tool called TubeBuddy that already exists and does most of what I was planning to build. I&#39;ve started using TubeBuddy in the past few months and really like it. If you use this link to buy a license, I&#39;ll get a small cut for being an affiliate: https://www.tubebuddy.com/cjavdev. #rails #rubyonrails
tags: [CRUD, How to add a Categories feature, Rails, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Ruby on Rails basics]
views: 417
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/adding-a-categories-feature
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJXLwQGwqDI
youtube_id: WJXLwQGwqDI
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/WJXLwQGwqDI
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WJXLwQGwqDI/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Adding a Categories feature

*Published: March 03, 2021*
*Views: 417*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJXLwQGwqDI)

[![Adding a Categories feature](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WJXLwQGwqDI/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJXLwQGwqDI)

## Description

This is more of a basic Rails CRUD episode where we upgrade from a simple text subtitle to a video category. This makes managing a group of videos in a specific category a bit easier. We&#39;ll manage colors in the category rather than a subtitle.

Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/video_automation
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cjav_dev
Feedback: https://forms.gle/Q31hhjJGsMrvY4mL6

It turns out there&#39;s a really excellent tool called TubeBuddy that already exists and does most of what I was planning to build. I&#39;ve started using TubeBuddy in the past few months and really like it. If you use this link to buy a license, I&#39;ll get a small cut for being an affiliate: https://www.tubebuddy.com/cjavdev.
#rails #rubyonrails

## Transcript

what&#39;s up friends in the last episode we&#39;ve were able to upload thumbnails directly to youtube using um the svg to pngs that we&#39;ve converted uh in this episode what i wanted to go over was extracting out this comment this concept of a like a sub title so right now our videos have a title they have a subtitle um but now for now like every single time we want to change the subtitle we have to go in and edit the subtitle uh and i think what we want to do instead of a subtitle is actually to have like a series or a category or some other like group that these all fall into because meta programming like ruby meta programming is actually like the um kind of the group of videos that i made one with send one with const get and then one with uh define method right and so um in addition to changing what the subheading is on the thumbnail i think i&#39;d also like to maybe change things like the the actual svg that we&#39;re using for the thumbnail maybe change uh i don&#39;t know the color of the fonts or something or the actual fonts that are chosen so what i want to do is remove this concept of a subtitle and add a new concept called category so let&#39;s do that let&#39;s do the migration remove subtitle from videos so we&#39;ll do this migration that drops the column on videos for subtitle so remove column videos subtitle break db migrate and in a future episode i&#39;ll show how to deploy this we&#39;ll probably deploy it to heroku maybe digitalocean not sure yet so we&#39;ll say like rails g model category and then like a category could have several videos in it but i think what a category might also have is the um the name the name of the category so it&#39;s going to be like ruby meta programming and then perhaps we have like two different colors so we&#39;ll have like a primary color and a secondary color that&#39;ll help us design the category um and then what else are we going to have with a category like a category might have the svg image also but we can come back and add that later um so it&#39;s gonna have a name primary secondary let&#39;s do like primary font or maybe we should call these like um shoot uh railsg model category it&#39;s gonna have a name and then we&#39;re gonna have let&#39;s call it the title color and the subtitle color and then we&#39;ll have the title font and the subtitle font and i think we can figure out like do we want to store yeah i don&#39;t know this might be interesting we could potentially use the google fonts is there google fonts api let&#39;s see google font api that would be kind of interesting to use the google fonts api to pull in different colors simple to use free to use developer api okay yeah so we might even be able to use this with the same stuff that we&#39;re using for um for youtube for the youtube api just like hit the developer api for the fonts and then show those so okay so let&#39;s let&#39;s keep those for now but initially we&#39;ll just work on getting the name title color and subtitle color working to override instead of having just like a hard-coded subtitle on every single video okay and that i think looks good they&#39;re all string values cool next uh let&#39;s what&#39;s going on here uh okay so that that worked that created the thing um okay so then let&#39;s also rails g migration add category id to videos category references because we want each video to now belong to a category um so uh create what is it called again categories uh create category okay create categories it&#39;s gonna have a name and it&#39;s title color is going to be default to something and this will also default to something so let&#39;s go use the colors that we&#39;re using already here i stuck to the server nope rails s no rails s okay um what are the colors that we&#39;re using oh let&#39;s see break db migrate oh we don&#39;t want it to run the migration we want it to yeah okay so we&#39;re because we&#39;re adding a new foreign key column to the database that does not already exist we will need to either go update our our migration to create category ids for every single object that&#39;s in there but because this is just test data it&#39;s way easier to say rake db drop db create db migrate and dbc but i don&#39;t actually remember what&#39;s in the seeds file right now so let&#39;s just re-migrate the entire database so this is failing oh it&#39;s failing because because our create categories thing isn&#39;t null false um we never got we never got all the way to the right answer here okay so let&#39;s let&#39;s open up our um thumb base and what were the colors that we used here so the subtitle was this subtitle was this and then the title was this um okay and then um so title font i don&#39;t know if that&#39;s going to be enough actually i&#39;m just going to delete those because we&#39;re going to need like the size and the weight in the family so let&#39;s just leave it off for now and we&#39;ll just use roboto and just change the colors around so let&#39;s see rake db migrate okay it&#39;s failing because categories does not exist add category id to videos yeah because it should it should this one should run after we run create categories is it not creating categories okay break db drop i swear that&#39;s what we just created though cat tit oh cat orgies breaking drop there we go okay finally that that misspelling um category has kind of messed me up there okay so now we should be able to say rails s great refresh oh there are no videos left so let&#39;s go to our seed file c dot rb and this won&#39;t actually work because we&#39;re not setting a category so in our seed file let&#39;s also create a category and we&#39;ll say category.create and the name is just going to be default and that should be fine um break db drop dv create db migrate db seed this should run them all like sort of in order and oh no okay so shoot as part of my misspelling it also written miss and like named the model differently category darby category.rb okay now if we if we run rake youtube fetch videos this should hit the youtube api oh right okay so now we need to connect to youtube oops s perhaps i should store the results of the youtube session in the seed file so i could like always just be logged in but the uh the auth tokens expire after 24 hours anyway so it&#39;s not a huge deal okay null value in category id okay so now we go to youtube and then or youtube.rake and in here we can say category it category.first and oh oh my gosh okay so on the video object we now have to say like belongs to category oh it seems like we did something nice all right so we&#39;ve got our videos back and cool all right cool so now what we want to do is create the concept of categories so rails g controller categories and we&#39;re going to have an index we&#39;re going to have a new probably have edit and that&#39;s it let&#39;s see okay in the index view for categories let&#39;s see at categories equals category.all new is going to be at category is category.new edit is going to be at category equals category.find params id we&#39;ll have an update we&#39;ll have a create and at category is category.new param category params if at category dot save redirect to categories path else flash dot now errors it&#39;s equal to at category.errors.full messages and then we&#39;ll just render new again and we basically want the same stuff for update um it&#39;s going to be only different in that we&#39;re going to say update instead of dot save so at category is category. find rams id category.update category params and now we need to define what category params looks like so we&#39;ll say category params is params that require category dot permit the name title uh title color and subtitle color and let&#39;s just leave it at that for now okay so let&#39;s go create the views so in our index view categor index is going to be here&#39;s our categories and we&#39;re going to say ul and inside the ul we&#39;re going to have at categories.each do category and it&#39;s just going to be the name and a link to edit um let&#39;s see with so it&#39;s going to be linked to the category.name and then edit category path and then we&#39;ll just have like a a tag up here that&#39;s like slash category or like okay i don&#39;t know what we want to do link to uh add category and that&#39;ll be the new category path all right let&#39;s see what this looks like so if we go to slash categories nothing happens because it&#39;s not in the routes yet uh all right so resources categories okay refresh the page edit category oh man i misspelled this again uh edit category path category okay cool so we&#39;ve got our default one that brings us to the edit for that if we click add we go to the new page all right so let&#39;s go add a form.html partial and in here um yeah we want just like a a form that&#39;s going to go to let&#39;s see can we just grab these things and then say the action is going to be if the categories persisted then it&#39;ll go to the category path for the category otherwise we&#39;re going to the categories path for the post request so in we&#39;ll say add category on the button and yeah the label is going to be for the name and in the name here we need to say category with the square bracket thing um and then in the new we want to render the form and in edit we want to render the form and here we&#39;ll say edit category name and then here we&#39;ll say like add category all right so add category here&#39;s our name testing click add category all right we&#39;ve got a testing category oh okay so it didn&#39;t didn&#39;t keep the didn&#39;t keep it populated that&#39;s awful so i want to set the value equal to at category dot name okay cool testing one two three uh all right let&#39;s make the button just like submit because then it&#39;ll work for both um and we also need to include this hidden input with underscore method as the name and put as the value if the category is not or is persisted so for editing it needs to send a put request right testing123 submit now update uh perm i keep misspelling things we&#39;re moving too fast videos controller so in our update action here um oh no not the video category categories controller update this should be params id refresh look at that so we&#39;ve got default we&#39;ve got testing one two three add a category um this is another category category okay submit cool we&#39;ve got we got several now um and we can we can edit them let&#39;s say like this is um ruby meta meta programming submit cool now what we want to do is update our video form so that we can so that we can select the category instead of the subtitle here so here we&#39;re going to say this is category and we&#39;re going to be picking actually we need a select box so say select and the name for this is going to be um what is the name it&#39;s going to be video category id and the options are going to be the category so it&#39;s going to be like uh yeah option value is category.id category.name i&#39;m so tempted to just use c instead of category categories categories.each do category we&#39;ll need to go add this to our controller so that it actually exposes at categories as an instance variable so videos control this is going to be in the edit action and we have a few of these already okay so now if we go back to one of our videos like const get is a meta programming and ruby video so we say edit and then for the category we can select meta programming and then we can say update but right now the update action is going to update the video with the videos params but it doesn&#39;t include the category id anymore so let&#39;s update that and then we can click this say update video and now if we um [Music] if we go to thumb it&#39;s still using subtitle in the thumb base for the svg we&#39;re using subtitle somewhere here yeah so this now we want this to be like category dot name or something instead okay awesome so ruby meta program this is coming from the category now so if we go back over here and we go to like slash categories and we change the name of ruby meta programming to like ruby meta and submit if we go home and then we go to const get and go to thumb then we have ruby meta awesome so this is pulling from the category that&#39;s so cool uh so let&#39;s let&#39;s also update our base here so that we&#39;re filling the text with the color from the category um category dot subtitle color i think it is let&#39;s see um we&#39;re gonna use the annotate gem to add the new columns that we created as comments to our category so now if we open our category we see title color and subtitle color so if we go to our thumb base dot svg here category.subtitle color should work and then here for title we&#39;ll say category.title color and when these when these svgs are rendered it should select out the color so now if we go into actually let&#39;s just add those as yeah let&#39;s add those into our categories uh controller or category into our form for categories let&#39;s add inputs for the colors so let&#39;s say um sub or just title color and for now i think there might actually be elements for selecting colors like color picker elements but we can we can add that in a second oh also i&#39;m noticing that yeah this these actually do need names so name is title color you want the name in your input to match the label so that when someone is looking at the ui they can just click on they can click on the the name and that&#39;ll add focus to the input so if you don&#39;t have this then it it won&#39;t do that so if we have name here subtitle color and then if we refresh the page let&#39;s see subtitle color it&#39;s not working for those is the name oh i this needs to be id sorry id not name id the name is what&#39;s going to be passed as like the the name in the object that&#39;s passed the server the id is what&#39;s used to target the focus see how the focus is changing there so let&#39;s see color input element html oh input type color cool let&#39;s see if it works as we expect all right refresh holy moly look at that that is super cool holy smokes okay so let&#39;s say the subtitle color is some like nasty green and the title color is yellow maybe it&#39;s gonna be like a javascript thing submit and then if we go back to our video for const get and we go to the thumbnail is it gonna be a different color oh my gosh look at that it&#39;s so cool holy smokes uh i love it i love it so epic you can just like change the color based on the category and you can change the name based on the category and all the stuff changes so so cool i definitely think we could change the fonts and we can use the google font api and we could um yeah maybe we could even add like tools for backdrops and some other stuff but uh for now this is pretty cool and i&#39;m pretty happy with it so i&#39;m gonna call that a good one thanks for watching and we so we uh yeah just as like a recap what we did is we went through we added a new concept of a category and the categories are sort of like the you can think of a category as like a series of videos or as like a specific topic that you&#39;re talking about a lot or as like a yeah like maybe the way that you&#39;re grouping up a course so a category could relate to a course so maybe you have like a course about beginner rails you have a course about beginner laravel you have a course about php or something like you could have different categories for each of those with different colors so that people could identify the thumbnail really quickly so i think there&#39;s a couple other things we might be able to do with this like in terms of the template that&#39;s used for the description we could somehow maybe associate a category with a default template or something but for now i&#39;m happy with this and yeah in the next episode perhaps we can mess around with the google font api and or deploy to um deploy this out to some live production server so until then thanks friends [Music]

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