I have a messaging app where users can send multiple types of messages (text, video, image, etc). I would like to model these with different schemas, but I need to be able to query them and get back one list of all types of messages. What would be the best way to go about modeling this? My initial …

I suppose you could just have a generic %Message{} struct with a type field. In that case you could pattern match like this case message do %Message{type: "text"} -> ... %Message{type: "video"} -> ...

Wouldn’t you still end up with one big “god” schema for all types of messages?

Depending on the data stored, a solution would be to simply embed the message-type specific data in JSON

At this point I’m still using a one large schema that looks a bit like this: schema "messages" do field :type, DB.MessageType, default: :text field :text, :string field :video_url, :string field :image_url, :string ... end The DB.MessageType is a custom Ecto type that basically transla…

We’ve done this at my company with really bad results. Here’s how I would have done it differently. In your first phase, design your app with plain ole’ Structs. This is nice because you can focus on the problem without all the DB issues sneaking in. Write it to solve the application problem you ha…

Wow, thanks for the advice. I’m running into this problem right now myself – focusing too much on how I should represent my data in ecto when I should really be focusing on how to represent it in the application itself.

@pdilyard : I recommend to write Ecto extension for it (for all validation things). You can find all my ideas for Ecto extensions here: [image] Things that could be helpful from my experience in Ecto (plug-in) Questions / Help Hey, I worked on some projects and I collected …

[image] michaeljbishop: In other words, use Ecto for saving and loading data, but don’t pass Structs generated by Ecto.Schema through the core of your application. Make your own Structs in your application core and pass those around. I have to wonder whether this is more of a process issue. S…

Elixir Programming Language Forum

Polymorphism in Ecto schemas

Questions & Help Questions

gregstula-autoreleas March 21, 2017, 12:58pm 6

Hi what solution did you finally use?

How to handle schemas polymorphism in Phoenix?