ollien

ollien

I was writing a GenServer and quickly discovered the need to generate tasks within this GenServer. This GenServer can not have a globally unique name (as I require many instances of it. I decided to keep the current module structure, changing the GenServer to a Supervisor and spawning my original GenServer as a child of this supervisor (with the Supervisor having public functions that call the child GenServer). Ideally, my supervision tree would look something like this

     MyServerSupervisor 
              /\
             /  \
            /    \
   MyGenServer   MyTaskSupervisor

Also, ideally, I would spawn my tasks within MyTaskSupervisor. However, the obvious question arises: how does MyGenServer discover this task supervisor? In other projects, I’ve given this task supervisor a globally unique name, but I can’t do that here.

Looking into the problem, I’ve seen many suggestions to use a Registry, but those require globally unique names. In order to have a registry for my task supervisors, I’d have to spawn the Registry in my root supervisor to ensure all of my processes can find it. It would be a lot nicer if I could somehow register the task supervisor in the context MyServerSupervisor. Is there a way to achieve what I want, or is the closest analog the solution I just described?

Thanks!

Showing Posts 1 to 2

al2o3cr

al2o3cr

Question about naming:

How do you tell these apart? That’s where a Registry would usually come in handy.

For instance, imagine that each instance can be identified by an Erlang term that we’ll call id. Could be a database ID, could be a UUID, could be an ARN, whatever.

Start a single top-level Registry instance, we’ll name it MyServerRegistry for concreteness.

Then instances of MyServerSupervisor would name themselves like:

{:via, Registry, {MyServerRegistry, id}}

While instances of MyGenServer and MyTaskSupervisor could be named like:

{:via, Registry, {MyServerRegistry, id, :server}}
# vs
{:via, Registry, {MyServerRegistry, id, :task_supervisor}}
ollien

ollien OP

How do you tell these apart? That’s where a Registry would usually come in handy.

In those cases I was just going to use an atom for a name (they don’t need to be dynamically generated and there’s not many of them).

That does seem like a sensible strategy though.

— All posts loaded —

Where Next? Top

Trending in Questions Top

katta
I having some trouble figuring out if I have set myself too strict of standards for my production server. Currently I can handle 75% of r...
New
achenet
Hello, I’m trying to build a basic Phoenix web-app, and I’d like to use Tailwind. However, when I launch mix phx.server, I get an error...
New
kpanic
Hi everyone, I am toying with the idea of building a “match maker” for giving personal help to people that wants to start coding. I sta...
New
Cxx-mlr
I’m working on a small exercise involving update_in/3, and I came up with this solution: data = %{ name: "Periodic Table", category:...
New
ChrisAmelia
I’ve got trouble wrapping my head around the order in which functions are called in this snippet (from Phoenix’s authentication): toke...
New
dillonoconnor
Is there any way to avoid the Hologram compiler running when using iex? It seems like the front-end code could potentially be disregarded...
New
thiagogsr
** (ArgumentError) expected :max_attempts to be a positive integer, got: {:@, [line: 10, column: 19], [{:max_attempts, [line: 10, column:...
New

Other Trending Topics Top

GenericJam
Edit: 2026 May 15 - This post is archived. Mob is alive!! Main docs: mob v0.7.11 — Documentation A bit of explanation for the slightly c...
New
mudasobwa
I am happy to introduce the very α version of the new programming language compiled to BEAM. Welcome Cure. It has literally three kille...
New
garrison
Hobbes is a low-level distributed database for the Elixir programming language. Hobbes provides a simple, safe, and scalable storage lay...
New
budgie
A little off-topic, but I feel like people here have a good head on their shoulders. I used to be quite good at making software. Was luc...
New
KristerV
Hey. Is there anyone here who creates agents in their apps? Not talking about using agents, but creating them. I’m finding it pretty diff...
New
mcass19
ExRatatui lets you cook up rich terminal UIs in Elixir, powered by Rust’s ratatui via Rustler NIFs. Build interactive terminal applicatio...
New

We're in Beta

About us Mission Statement

Options

Thread Display Mode




Thread Preview

Skip Thread Previews