Multi-step forms in Ash - what's the Ash way?

Ash Forum Ash Questions / Help
1

Firstly, props to the Zach and the rest of the Ash team for their incredible work and dedication in making the Ash Framework and extensions freely available to the community. Have bought the Ash book and am going through it.

It occurred to me that alot of projects required complex data input by users which is best done in multi-step forms.

In Vanilla Phoenix and Liveview I’ve used changesets mapped to individual fields and live components with a form for each field validating their own input - submitting sends to the parent liveview the params which are built up as the user progresses throught the form and finally the parent liveview handles storing the data.

Wondering if there is an Ash recommended way of doing this?

New to Ash so at the start of the learning curve and am not at the stage where I totally grasp the capabilities of the framework,

Apologies if I’ve missed something totally obvious with this question.

Many thanks.

2

You can do something very similar using resources without a data layer.

i.e

defmodule Phase1 do
  use Ash.Resource

  attributes do
    ...
  end
end

defmodule Phase2 do
  use Ash.Resource

  attributes do
    ...
  end
end

defmodule Phase3 do
  use Ash.Resource

  attributes do
    ...
  end
end

and you can then have a form for each of those. When you submit, you’ll just get back a validated struct.

Additonally, you could use embedded attributes on a single resource, i.e

defmodule MultistepForm do
  use Ash.Resource

  attributes do
    attribute :phase1, Phase1
    attribute :phase2, Phase2
  end
end

defmodule Phase1 do
  use Ash.Resource, data_layer: :embedded

  attributes do
    ...
  end
end

defmodule Phase2 do
  use Ash.Resource, data_layer: :embedded

  attributes do
    ...
  end
end
3 Likes
3

:folded_hands:

Zach - thank you. I’m in Oz - can’t believe I got an answer so quickly from whatever timezone you’re in!

I apologise that this question may have been very basic but it was an itch I needed to scratch and your answer is incredibly helpful in opening up my understanding of Ash - I really think that Ash is definitely the way forward in developing robust applications in elixir.

Once again, I’m very grateful for your help.

1 Like
4

Not basic at all :slight_smile: welcome to the community!

2 Likes