Has anyone come up with a good way to create some form of module registry that can be used to lookup a module by name. My use case is to have a module that can deserialize a list of heterogeneous items. I would like the different items to be added to a registry automatically. Ultimately, it would be nice to ‘auto’ generate the Filters module below.

defmodule Filters do
  @moduledoc """
  Module that aids in dealing with filters. It acts as a registry that 
  knows about all the filter types at compile time.
  Supports serializing and deserializing a list of heterogeneous filter types.
  """

  # Serialize a specific filter, adding name to serialized value.
  # this can be better handled with `Protocols` and defimpl in __using__ macro. 
  # This is not the difficult part.
  def serialize(%Filter1{} = filter) do
    %{
        type: "filter1",
        value: Filter1.serialize(filter)
      } |> Jason.encode!()
  end

  def deserialize(s) when is_binary(s) do
     # s is a json encoded string that needs to be 
     # deserialized into one of the filter modules below

    deserialize(Jason.decode!(s))
  end

 # THIS IS THE FUNCTION THAT I WOULD LIKE TO GET AUTO GENERATED, or have
 # some kind of registry that can give me the module for some arbitrary name.
 #
 # Some means to create a specific struct given some name, in this case, "filter1"
 def deserialize(%{type: "filter1", value: value}) do
  Filter1.deserialize(value)
 end
end

defmodule Filter1 do
  # can something be done in the declaration of this module
  # to add it to the Filters module?
  def serialize(filter), do...
  def deserialize(data), do...
end

defmodule Filter2 do
...
end