sushilbansal
Ecto Enum display issue
Hi,
I am trying to use Ecto.Enum as following:
schema "demographics" do
field :gender, Ecto.Enum,
values: [
male: "Male",
female: "Female",
other: "Other",
prefer_not_to_say: "Prefer not to say"
]
field :year_of_birth, :integer
timestamps(type: :utc_datetime)
end
# function to get all the gender options - will be used with select input component
def get_gender_options() do
Ecto.Enum.dump_values(__MODULE__, :gender)
end
It is working fine; it is saving in DB as string (e.g. “Prefer not to say”). Issue occurs when i fetch the db record and display on LiveView. It displays gender as: prefer_not_to_say
How i can get LV to display “Prefer not to say”.
One way i can think of is:
schema "demographics" do
field :gender, Ecto.Enum,
values: [
:Male,
:Female,
:Other,
:"Prefer not to say"
]
field :year_of_birth, :integer
timestamps(type: :utc_datetime)
end
Is there any other way?
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LostKobrakai
Generally I’d argue that your db representation should be separate from your frontend representation. Just because you store :male runtime value as "Male" in the database doesn’t mean your frontend should render :male as "Male" (applies the same the other direction).
But if you really want to reuse that mapping you can get to it using Ecto.Enum.mappings(schema, :gender).
champeric
I know some people don’t like using them, but it’s way better in my opinion to use an ENUM if you’re using PostgreSQL. It uses the same space as an int, but it will be readable and better in terms of data integrity (you can’t have a value that doesn’t exist).
There are some caveats, but I never had any problems with them.
CREATE TYPE gender AS ENUM ('male', 'female', 'other');
LostKobrakai
Yeah, have two separate mappings. One from atom to frontend string, which can then potentially handle things like localization and another one (the Ecto.Enum one) for atom → db string.
Hermanverschooten
Chiming in, I prefer to use integers in the db, they take less space, and since Ecto returns the atoms in both cases.
smathy
It’s definitely not tedious to add a value, that’s simple and has been available since pg 9.1. Renaming has been available since 10 which alleviates most of the need for deleting, but yes - deleting is a bit tedious, but IMHO appropriately so - you have other issues if you’re needing to delete enum values more than “almost never” 
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