--- title: Postgres enums in Ruby on Rails - CreatorPlatform.xyz - Part 5 slug: postgres-enums-in-ruby-on-rails-creatorplatform-xyz-part-5 published_at: 2022-09-10 12:19:36 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:13:14 +0000 summary: description: Postgres enums in Ruby on Rails. Using the create_enum method in a Rails migration, we can create a new Enum datatype in postgres that we can use from our models. We'll also talk about several enum configurations for enabling prefixes or suffixes and disabling scopes that are automatically generated for you. 00:00 Introduction 00:24 Generate a new Event model 01:21 Create enum datatype in Rails migration 02:24 Review enums in postgresql database 03:24 Set up enums in Active Record model 06:05 Conclusion Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS6F722u-R6IJfBrIRx3a2SBkAL4vUp2p Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/creators.dev/ Documentation: https://api.rubyonrails.org/v5.2.4.4/classes/ActiveRecord/Enum.html Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/cjav_dev #rubyonrails #ruby #rails tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, javascript, ruby on rails, active record, ruby on rails tutorial, enum, postgres, postgresql, rails enum, create_enum rails, ruby on rails enum tutorial, Postgres enums in Ruby on Rails, creator platform, creatorplatform, creatorplatform.xyz, ruby on rails project, ruby on rails 2022, ruby on rails 7, enums in rails, enums with ruby on rails] views: 1546 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/postgres-enums-in-ruby-on-rails-creatorplatform-xyz-part-5 youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9W5dwHbY3Y youtube_id: H9W5dwHbY3Y embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/H9W5dwHbY3Y thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/H9W5dwHbY3Y/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Postgres enums in Ruby on Rails - CreatorPlatform.xyz - Part 5 *Published: September 10, 2022* *Views: 1546* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9W5dwHbY3Y) [![Postgres enums in Ruby on Rails - CreatorPlatform.xyz - Part 5](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/H9W5dwHbY3Y/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9W5dwHbY3Y) ## Description Postgres enums in Ruby on Rails. Using the create_enum method in a Rails migration, we can create a new Enum datatype in postgres that we can use from our models. We'll also talk about several enum configurations for enabling prefixes or suffixes and disabling scopes that are automatically generated for you. 00:00 Introduction 00:24 Generate a new Event model 01:21 Create enum datatype in Rails migration 02:24 Review enums in postgresql database 03:24 Set up enums in Active Record model 06:05 Conclusion Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS6F722u-R6IJfBrIRx3a2SBkAL4vUp2p Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/creators.dev/ Documentation: https://api.rubyonrails.org/v5.2.4.4/classes/ActiveRecord/Enum.html Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/cjav_dev #rubyonrails #ruby #rails ## Transcript what's up welcome back in this episode we're going to create events to store our our uh webhook event data but we're going to learn a ton about enums in some recent releases of rails there's new support for special enum things that you can build inside of postgres let's take a look at what i'm talking about so we're going to generate a new model called event now that event is going to have some data we're going to store that as json that's going to be the event that's coming from some source maybe like stripe or twitter or some other social platform that our creators are working with now we're also going to have some processing errors and those will be stored as text but we might also store an enum value for the status of this event that we received so the status might be start out in this pending state and then as we kick off the processing it'll go to processing and then eventually failed now we've talked about this status field in the past and used an integer value in the database but now we're going to use the the actual data type inside of postgres for an enum so we're going to say status is going to be an enum now let's take a look at this migration because there's a couple changes that we need to make by default just setting the enum to the type of status doesn't work yet with rail seven it might work in the future but we need it we need to do a couple more things here so number one we need to call this new method inside the migration called create enum now the type of enum that we're going to create is a status and we're also going to set the values for that status so in this case we might start off with pending then processing then processed then failed okay so these are the different status types that we want for our enum now for our enum status here what we can do is we can specify that rather than just being an integer we want to use the enum type of status we're going to set the default to pending and we want to set null is false now we need a comma there and we should be good to go let's run this migration and see what it gives us so we say rails db migrate that will create this new enum notice this create enum it's not creating a table it's creating a new enum with the name status and all these different possible values there's another cool thing we can do we can say railsdbconsole and this will log us into our postgres database and we can say d to look at the list of all the different tables we now see this events table so we can say slash d for events what does events look like well now we see this status and the type is not integer the type of the status column is status itself that's interesting right so it's not an integer it's not a json or it's not a text it's a status there's another thing we can do inside of the postgres um sort of like i don't know this postgres cli or whatever so we can do slash d capital t plus this shows us all of our actual internal types so here we have the type is called status here's the different elements of that type we have pending processing processed and failed very cool stuff so we're going to say quit all right but that's not all we need to do we need to open up our model and update it so that it has context about that status at the event object level so we're going to say enum status and here we actually need to specify each of the different statuses so we're going to say pending is pending processing is process is processed failed has failed and we want to set the default to pending okay now if we open up the rails console we can say e is event dot create and now we can see e dot status is pending we can also say eat a pending question mark and that tells us true we can say e dot processing is it processing no it's not processing now all of these methods that it adds at the top level by default are going to use the name of the values of the enum but you can also say prefix true now before prefix used to have an underscore at the beginning of it but that's changed now we can say e equals event dot last e dot status processed or status pending so now this prefix will add status underscore to the beginning of each of those fields now that can be handy if for some reason you had a status that was like um i don't know private or a status that was a method that would otherwise probably be on the instance of the event so prefix it also has suffix so we can say suffix true so exit so we can say e is event.last e dot pending status so is the status pending or i mean is it is it in a pending status so you now have the ability to put the underscore status at the end or status underscore at the beginning which is pretty nice another thing you'll find is that now we have event dot pending status as a scope that will give us all the different events that have the pending status that's pretty neat you can also say give me all of the events that are in the processing status okay that'll give us all of the events that are in the processing status again this is using that status type inside of postgres very very cool stuff so i think what i'm going to do is actually just remove the suffix now those scopes are pretty cool but if for some reason you did not want those scopes you could come over here and say scopes false and now when we reload and say event dot processing status that is not a that is not going to be a method that's available on the event because we've disabled scopes for that specific status all right we've got i'm going to enable i'm going to disable the suffix and allow scopes and we've got our status set up now in the next episode i want to go through and actually set up a web hook handler we're going to wire it up so that we receive events from stripe at least to start and that'll help us get ready for our custom connect onboarding thanks so much for watching and we'll see in the next one [Music] you --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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