Does Ecto2 have support for ordered many-to-many? (or one-to-many for that matter) To make it concrete, imagine a book with multiple authors (their order is crucial), a user profile with favorite topics (in order of preference), etc.
The simple solution of having an intermediate table (book_author, user_topic, etc) doesn’t encode order, so typically a 3rd field would be added to encode the position, eg: book_id, author_id, author_rank.
In https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto/issues/659 I see that Ecto can now apparently order_by on preloading one of the associates, but can it order_by on the association itself (to order_by author_rank in a book_author intermediate table?)
Short answer is no. You would need to use has_many :through instead of many_to_many. Another alternative is to have author_ids as an {:array, :integer} in the books table.
I assume you mean has_many directly linking to the intermediate table, as in has_many :books_tables, through: etc... and then preloading that books_table association to read its author_rank field? (as in the documentation for has_many/3 )
(I was indeed considering an author_ids array, but that loses me the straightforward SQL querying capacities - all books by an author, etc)
