Ecto schema inside its own context?

Phoenix Forum Questions / Help
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1

Hello, i am a newbie in both phoenix and elixir and its been a blast so far. I have a question about ecto schemas and phoenix contexts.

Suppose i have two tables called clubs and club_members. While generating a new schema with phx.gen.schema

  1. Should i create the club schema under club context ?

  2. Or should i create club schema without context and put member schema under club context?

First approach results in module name being Club.Club but directory structure seems better. While module naming in second approach seems better but club schema sits outside club directory.

I guess what i am asking is which one of these is better?

/001 ļ»  club/ī˜­  member.ex
/002 ī˜­  club.ex

/001 ļ»  club/ī˜­  member.ex
/001 ļ»  club/ī˜­  club.ex
2

The most common way to solve this would be to call the context clubs, so you would have Clubs.Club and Clubs.Member.

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3

Generally if you are using contexts as a boundary, then you put all the schemas belonging to a context under it.
Also by convention, if there isnā€™t a good unique name for a context (which there often isnā€™t) then itā€™s the pluralized version of its primary schema. You could just call your context Club if you want, but this can become confusing and it also makes it impossible to alias the schema within the context as they will have the same name. So the ā€œnormalā€ thing to do is this:

lib/my_app/clubs/club.ex
lib/my_app/clubs/member.ex
lib/my_app/clubs.ex

This way the directory structure mimics the module structure. Some people like to put the context file in the context directory, which is fine, whatever floats your boat!

Technically, though, you are free to do whatever you want! The generators push us towards certain conventions, but otherwise Phoenix doesnā€™t impose any conventions on us.

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4

Thank you for the explanation!

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