Hi everybody,
I don’t know how to explain it without being confusing so let me give an example right away.
Let’s say I have two schemas (User and Profile) that somehow match with their related DB tables:
defmodule MyApp.User do
schema "users" do
field :email, :string
field :password, :string
field :name, :string
end
end
defmodule MyApp.UserProfile do
schema "user_profiles" do
field :phone, :string
field :avatar, :string
belongs_to :user, MyApp.User
end
end
Now I can access to a user’s phone by grabbing that user, loading its profile then accessing like so user.profile.phone.
Now if I have very different kind of users (with very different profiles and behavior), it might become complex real quick… I think of a legacy application in Rails that deal with all kind of Design Patterns like polymorphic association or Single Table Inheritance, etc.
I love working with contexts and I guess that reasoning with context could potentially simplify this hugely.
For example I found the possibility to use different schemas for a given same table (an example posted in the forum) according to a particular context very useful.
There we are using different schema from the same table, but I wonder if it’s possible to do the exact opposite like having a schema defined from multiple tables?
For example, having something like that as an end result (considering a different PartnerUser with a complete different set of profile on its own table) :
defmodule MyApp.Dashboard.RegularUser do
some_kind_of_schema do
field :name, :string, from: "users"
field :avatar, :string, from: "user_profiles"
# other fields like password or phone ignored
end
end
defmodule MyApp.Dashboard.Partner do
some_kind_of_schema do
field :email, :string, from: "users"
field :name, :string, from: "users"
field :department, :string, from: "partner_profiles"
# other fields ignored
end
end
So this is just an example of the end result and I put aside how this can be implemented with joins etc…
Also I am pretty sure that I’m currently over-engineering this and that it might be something very simple (like when using PORO in Rails).
I’m just stick and focused on a task right now that I can’t see the wood for the trees… and that I can’t event think of a solution using bare elixir aside from exposing a dedicated struct that I can flatten from a public function…
Maybe this is simply the solution?
I’m very welcome to any suggestion.
