Phone Numbers in Rails with Normalizes and Generated Columns

The text discusses the challenges of working with phone numbers in a Ruby on Rails application that uses Vonage Communications APIs. It highlights the importance of specifying a destination phone number for interactions such as automated calls, SMS, and two-factor authentication. The article explains how to normalize phone number data using the `normalizes` method, which ensures that the data conforms to a specific format before persisting it to a database. Additionally, it introduces Generated Columns, a feature in Rails 7.0 that allows for virtual columns with derived values from other columns, providing a cleaner solution to combine country code and phone number data. The article concludes by highlighting the usefulness of these features in developing applications with Vonage Communications APIs.