munksgaard

munksgaard

I’m working my way through the Ash book and got the chapter on creating an “album” that is associated with an artist. The book suggests that the way to handle passing in the associated artist when creating a new album involves the forms DSL from AshPhoenix. Here’s the specific snippet:

forms do
  form :create_album, args: [:artist_id]
end

This results in the creation of a form_to_create_album/2 function that takes an artist_id as the first argument. This of course works fine, but it worries me a bit that it takes a raw ID as the first argument (typically an integer or UUID). If there was more than one reference that needed to be added, there’s a non-zero chance that I’ll accidentally pass in the arguments in the wrong order without knowing about it.

In non-Ash projects in the past, I’ve taken to enforcing some additional safety in cases like this by having a function like form_to_create_album/2 take a %Artist{} as the first argument and pattern match on it to ensure that it’s correct. So, my question is, is that something that’s easy to do with Ash/AshPhoenix, or would it require custom actions or something? Or is this pattern simply not used in Ash?

I’m still very new to Ash, so please forgive my ignorance if this was a bad question.

Showing Posts 1 to 2

zachdaniel

zachdaniel

Creator of Ash

I believe that if you keep reading you will see a mechanism to have special argument types for your code interfaces. That example could be adjusted to taking a struct at the interface level and an id at the action level :slight_smile:

munksgaard

munksgaard OP

I guess that’s what I get for my impatience. Thanks for your response!

— 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
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
unaware8150
Hello folks! So at work, we are seeing some situations where we have to define some “fixed” strings that are used across the codebase in...
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