I am struggling whole day on this question. Current Monitor stores groups referenced by user_id, the question is how to store data in GenServer to handle many users related to many groups, finally to map groups and return users count by given group name?

Groups will be replaced frequently on each Phoenix Channel call.

My current code:

defmodule Myapp.Monitor do
  use GenServer

  def create(user_id) do
    case GenServer.whereis(ref(user_id)) do
      nil -> Myapp.Supervisor.start_child(user_id)
    end
  end

  def start_link(user_id) do
    GenServer.start_link(__MODULE__, [], name: ref(user_id))
  end

  def set_groups(user_pid, groups) do
    try_call user_pid, {:set_groups, groups}
  end

  def handle_call({:set_groups, groups}, _from, state) do
    { :reply, groups, groups } # reset user groups on each set_group call.
  end

  defp ref(user_id) do
    {:global, {:user, user_id}}
  end

  defp try_call(user_id, call_function) do
    case GenServer.whereis(ref(user_id)) do
      nil -> {:error, :invalid_user}
      user_pid -> GenServer.call(user_pid, call_function)
    end
  end
end

Supervisor:

defmodule Myapp.Supervisor do
  use Supervisor

  def start_link do
    Supervisor.start_link(__MODULE__, :ok, name: __MODULE__)
  end

  def start_child(user_id) do
    Supervisor.start_child(__MODULE__, [user_id])
  end

  def init(:ok) do
    supervise([worker(Myapp.Monitor, [], restart: :temporary)], strategy: :simple_one_for_one)
  end
end

Usage:

Monitor.create(5)
Monitor.set_groups(5, ['a', 'b', 'c'])
Monitor.create(6)
Monitor.set_groups(6, ['a', 'b'])
Monitor.set_groups(6, ['a', 'c'])
# not implemented:
# Monitor.users_in_gorup('a') # -> 2
# Monitor.users_in_gorup('b') # -> 1
# Monitor.users_in_gorup('c') # -> 2