I wanted to see how others deal with private and public function defaults conflict. In my context I like to have public functions that take the current_user from the request what ever other arguments are needed with a “matching” private function that only takes the arguments after the public function does some authorization.

here is a quick example of update user

# user context
def update_user(%User{} = current_user, %UpdateUser{} = update_user) do
    with :ok <- authorize(:update_user, current_user, update_user),
        {:ok, updated_user} <- update_user(update_user) do
        # some logic
    end
end

defp update_user(%UpdateUser{} = update_user) do
  # some logic
end

This works great 95% of the time but sometimes certain functions need to have default parameters

def list_company_users(%User{} = current_user, company_id, filters \\ %{}) do
    # some logic
end

defp list_company_users(company_id, filters) do 
  # some logic
end

For situations like this there is a conflict of having a private and a public function
defp list_company_users/2 conflicts with defaults from list_company_users/3

As a hacky workaround I made the arguments of the private function a tuple.

defp list_company_users({company_id, filters}) do 
  # some logic
end

I was curious if anyone else used a similar pattern and what solution they’ve taken when running into this issue.