A few years ago a built a system in Go that I’m trying to rebuild as a part of learning more about Ash and Phoenix. This involved users being able to generate various reports relating to water bodies in West Africa. We got the data by talking to a remote web service. This was usually very slow and it could take quite a while to get a repsonse back. In addition, we were only supposed to allow a limited number of report requests to run at a time (a value that they admins could change). Once we got a reponse back we would pull out the relevant information from the JSON and send it to a report server which would generate a report and give us a link which we could pass on to the user. Do to issues with electricity and stuff, the pending jobs would have to be able to restart if something were to happen and the service needed to be restarted.

I’m interested in how to conceptually tackle this using Ash. I’m sure I could pretty much follow the procedure I did in Go, but it feels like Ash provides functionality that might be of use here. I’m looking at the state machine and/or possibly the reactor? I have really dug into these yet, but it “smells” like one or both of them might be useful in some way.

I’d like to know if there is some Ash-esque way of dealing with those requirements and what that would involve. The Go solution ended up working well enough, but the code was a bit of a nightmare both to maintain and to build upon.