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(t…

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…

[image] LostKobrakai: your db representation should be separate from your frontend representation Thanks for the feedback. What’s the best way to keep db representation separate from frontend representation for Enums (will you store the mapping as a map and use it on front end to map it) or i…

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.

Chiming in, I prefer to use integers in the db, they take less space, and since Ecto returns the atoms in both cases.

All good but if someone else uses the database and/or there’s no Ecto to map the integers to atoms, the column’s values are meaningless. Strings and/or an enum type in the database are self documenting.

True, but I am dealing with millions of records and 1 integer value versus a string of 4~17 characters, makes a huge difference in storage and indexes.

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…

You are right. Even a lookup table and a foreign key column is better than plain integers. We don’t know @Hermanverschooten ’s context though. Might be storage constrained.

will it not be tedious to update (add or delete) an entry later on?

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Ecto Enum display issue

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Hermanverschooten January 23, 2024, 4:03pm 10

Didn’t know about the ENUM in pg, TIL
thx good to know.