EctoEnum

EctoEnum is an Ecto extension to support enums in your Ecto models.

Usage

Use the Ecto.Enum module in your model before using Ecto.Model like below:

defmodule MyApp.User do
  use Ecto.Enum
  use Ecto.Model

  schema "users" do
    enum :status, [registered: 0, active: 1, inactive: 2, archived: 3]
  end
end

You declare an enum field by using the enum/2 macro inside the schema block. This macro generates a status integer field and an enum_status virtual field. The status field returns an integer while enum_status returns an atom such as :register.

Helper functions are also provided. For the above MyApp.User model, we can check if the user model is registered by doing MyApp.User.registered?(user). You can check for the user's other status in the same way.

Setting enum_status for the user model is as good as setting its status when inserting or updating the model. For example:

iex> user = Repo.insert!(%User{enum_status: :registered})
iex> user.status
0
iex> user = Repo.update!(%{user|enum_status: :active})
iex> user.status
2

Inspecting a model's enum field's mapping in runtime is possible by invoking __enums__/1. It works like:

iex> User.__enums__(:status)
[registered: 0, active: 1, inactive: 2, archived: 3]

This can be useful for running queries since Ecto.Repo.Queryable does not know about enums unlike Ecto.Model. For example:

iex> registered = User.__enums__(:status)[:registered]
0
iex> from(u in User, where: u.status == ^registered)

Important links

• Documentation
• License