--- title: Data modeling with ActiveRecord for Video Automation tool slug: data-modeling-with-activerecord-for-video-automation-tool published_at: 2021-02-08 18:00:12 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:31 +0000 summary: description: Follow along as we build a tool to manage YouTube descriptions from Rails. In part 1, we cover the basic data model with ActiveRecord. Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/video_automation Twitter: https://twitter.com/cjav_dev Feedback: https://forms.gle/Q31hhjJGsMrvY4mL6 It turns out there's a really excellent tool called TubeBuddy that already exists and does most of what I was planning to build. I've started using TubeBuddy in the past few months and really like it. If you use this link to buy a license, I'll get a small cut for being an affiliate: https://www.tubebuddy.com/cjavdev. #rails #rubyonrails tags: [ruby, rails, ruby on rails, ActiveRecord, ORM, Data modeling with ActiveRecord for Video Automation tool, Rails Database, Postgresql, Data Modeling, object relational model, ActiveModel Base] views: 7021 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/data-modeling-with-activerecord-for-video-automation-tool youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_5z4FDBbqI youtube_id: n_5z4FDBbqI embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/n_5z4FDBbqI thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/n_5z4FDBbqI/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Data modeling with ActiveRecord for Video Automation tool *Published: February 08, 2021* *Views: 7021* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_5z4FDBbqI) [![Data modeling with ActiveRecord for Video Automation tool](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/n_5z4FDBbqI/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_5z4FDBbqI) ## Description Follow along as we build a tool to manage YouTube descriptions from Rails. In part 1, we cover the basic data model with ActiveRecord. Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/video_automation Twitter: https://twitter.com/cjav_dev Feedback: https://forms.gle/Q31hhjJGsMrvY4mL6 It turns out there's a really excellent tool called TubeBuddy that already exists and does most of what I was planning to build. I've started using TubeBuddy in the past few months and really like it. If you use this link to buy a license, I'll get a small cut for being an affiliate: https://www.tubebuddy.com/cjavdev. #rails #rubyonrails ## Transcript what's up everyone i am going to build a rails application which helps manage video descriptions so on youtube uh you'll notice that like most of the descriptions if you jump in here on uh on my page are just like super not informative at all and not useful at all and so i want to go through and make a tool that can like bulk update several videos and add information like links to resources links to various things and maybe even update thumbnails so here's the project plan or here's the things that i would want in a video description manager so it should support some sort of templates it should support bulk updating all the descriptions on a channel or all the descriptions um let's say like uh all descriptions um on a channel or all descriptions um on a playlist so that you could like pick those individually you should be able to also just update an individual description um and then like passing information about one or many presenters that are in the video with like social links or you know job titles things like that links to resources ideally maybe like a table of contents which shows you the chapter markers and then tags and thumbnails would be great to automate but kind of going to save that for later so the idea is that i'm going to create a rails application we'll deploy it to heroku and initially it'll be quite simple we will just create a crud application for updating um a bunch of different information about a video uh and then hopefully just spitting out just the text for the description based on these these things so um yeah i almost wonder if the templates should also be like channel wide versus playlist wide maybe we can just copy it from a channel to a playlist but the idea for a template would be that at the bottom you always have maybe you always have a link to support or you always have a link to something so that's kind of the idea and if you want to follow along great i'm going to put a link to the code in the um in the description and then also we'll just kind of go with it and we'll see how far we get and maybe in the future we'll do another episode where we can add to this or add additional features also i do want to try to use the youtube api in order to update some videos so this will be kind of like a combo situation where we're doing both like a rails crud app but also with a little bit of api interaction to update on youtube so i'm going to say rails new video let's see video descriptions or video automations no tests initially so i'm going to use postgres i'm going to use just like raw html and uh normal like rails routes to keep things super super simple it's just gonna be like a crud app um there's not gonna be any like react or anything um just kind of like really really basic client because that's all we really need uh okay so in here we are let's let's see so let's just fire this up actually we've got a rake db migrate or db create db migrate there's no migrations right now but that'll create the database and then we will need a video so youtube video api so in the youtube video data api they let you find all of the videos [Music] by playlist id i believe um you can also use like this search api to find all the videos um but yeah so there's another thing there's another piece of this that we're gonna need to like oauth into the youtube api so we will need to figure that piece out also but what i wanted to look at in a video is like what are the things that we might be interested in on the video object itself and so the the youtube api returns videos as uh as json in these kind of snippets and the id is going to be a string id and that like when you drill into a video and you see this watch v equals the the content that's after the v equals that's like the id of the video um so we're going to want a model here for a video and it's going to have the youtube id or i might call it external id that's a common practice but this time i'm just going to use youtube id and that's going to be a string value and then i also want to have the the video has like a title and a description um the existing description maybe uh and then it probably also has like a playlist and such let's see let's just go through the the snippet here so it has when it was published the channel id title description so um yeah i'm trying to think if we want to persist the title locally or if we want to just allow the title be something that's edited in the rails app and then later synced to um to the youtube video so let's just we'll store title here i think description is going to be a derived value we're not actually going to ever store the raw description and then we will want possibly a list of tags and we can do i think we can say array like this with postgres as our back backing store duration definition caption license allowed restrictions content ratings i don't really care about any of those upload status that might be interesting is to have some of this status information so that we could see whether or not it was uploaded maybe we can go back we can always go back and add that later recording details file details file name size type container um all right let's see processing errors processing warnings live streaming okay so i think this might be what we can start with but the things that we wanted to be able to support was some sort of template so i think we're gonna need like a video description template object uh we wanna be able to bulk update so this is just gonna be like logic that is built into our like api calls or whatever like the logic that we use to interact with the api updating same thing and then passing information about one or many presenters in the video so along with a video i think we will want like video presenters to be another model that we'll have so we'll have like video we'll have video template or like video or description template and for this description template i think we could use like erb or we could use um some like uh there's tons of different templating languages like mustache or whatever handlebars something we can use just like some nice template where we write it in we we build the template and then we can add like where we want to render certain pieces of the template that'll be kind of interesting um and then we're going to want like a video presenter and that is going to have a one two or one video to many video presenters and a video presenter okay let's see links to resources so video resource and that'll have like um the url and it'll be related back to the video uh and then table of contents that um should that just be just like a table um table of contents just as like a text blob maybe um and yeah so videos have a set of tags so we probably want to be able to manage these two things um later so for now i'm just going to keep it keep it like this we'll use these four models to to build up the the actual stuff here so is this going to be enough when we're actually fetching the video updating the video um we might want like a last synced at or something but we can come back and add those later so we're just kind of like building out the data model that's going to back the application so then we're also going to want um a let's see what do we say video presenter and this is going to have a video references so a video presenter will belong to an individual video potentially we could create a separate object called the presenter so we can reuse the same presenters over and over actually yeah let's do that let's do that so we're going to have a presenter and that'll have like a name twitter handle linked in what else do we have a role okay and a presenter is just hanging around out there uh let's see so we want to also create a video presenter and that's going to be a this is like the person who's on screen who's presenting like the demo person or whoever the voice is behind the video and this will be a video references that'll create an id or like a column in the database called video underscore id and that will be a foreign key to the id on video objects i don't know if i'm going to get in trouble with presenter because that's like a design pattern or whatever but okay so a video presenter um and then yeah it's just so this for now it's just gonna be like a join table between video and presenter um if we want later on we might be able to say like you know how much time they were on screen or some i don't know something interesting like that or if whether or not they were the guest or the host yeah let's just say roll and then if we wanted to later we could say guest or host or something and should we make it an integer actually i'm going to save that for later because we could add to that if we want but for now let's stick with this okay so we actually do we ended up with presenter and video presenter and then we also want a video resource rails g model video resource and this is going to have a url to the resource a title and so i'm thinking like when you're making a video like this that's talking about code you might have a resource that's like the link to the code and we're going to want the video references oh okay what else do we want description template so rails g model description template and this is going to have like the template content i don't know if yeah this so it should be text uh i think that should be okay but how does this actually apply or like how is this actually used by videos so when you're working with a video i think you need to assign it a description template to use so we might need to go back and add a description template id to the video object and maybe we could support several different renderers for our description template but for now we'll just keep it easy all right so we've got our description template okay so let's go into all these migrations that were just created so in db migrate we have a bunch of different migrations so in videos when videos are created we're going to have a youtube id should we make that required [Music] for now for now let's just leave it as is but let's add an index on videos youtube id um unique true so that it can't be we can't have like multiple videos in the database all referencing the same youtube video because we don't want to like overwrite the same one uh multiple times so we're gonna add an index on on youtube id let's actually make it in null false um and same with title null no um yeah and then this needs to be like array true i believe let's see so uh working with arrays rails um uh let's see uh array column rails let's see here oh wow okay you can use it no okay subjects text okay array true default okay so array true default is empty string and yeah okay so that should work table of contents we'll leave that blank it always takes me a long time to go through and add the chapter markers but maybe we should also call this chapter markers instead of that and i'm also like a little bit torn about whether or not the chapter markers should actually be its own model that has the id and the time as separate things um because then we could we could add those later if we had some sort of video editor or something we could like create the chapter markers at specific points in the video um hmm okay yeah let's make let's is that going to be a pain for now let's just keep it as text and then later if we wanted to we can improve this by making a model and making some ui by which you can create chapter markers all right the next one we created was presenters they have to have a name um they have to have a or they don't have to have twitter handle or linkedin or role that's fine and then we will we don't need to index on the name people have the same name that's fine video presenters cool that ended up working out great and then we'll add an index of video pre on the video presenters table of video and presenter actually i think we have to use id video underscore id and presenter id unique true this will prevent at the database level this should prevent multiple presenters being added or attached to the same video for some reason so we're going to have just like a uniqueness constraint on this video id and presenter id okay so video resources this has to have uh a title and a url and we want to i mean we could technically make a make a a unique column which is on video and url to enforce the uniqueness of like you can't have the same url for the same video multiple times but uh whatever we'll just leave that a little bit loosey-goosey for the template uh null false um and yeah that should be good okay let's run the migrations and see what breaks rake db uh migrate all right uh unknown variable where are we at let's see createvideoresources.rb um no oh okay and i'm trying to remember that we want to add um a relation between the description template and the video so rails g migration add description template to videos and then i can say description template references and i think that might work uh you kind of have to the stars have to align a little bit for that to work oh nice okay so i think that worked okay cool um yeah great okay so now we should have our database migrated um okay all right the next step i want to do is go update all of the models --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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