So I have being playing around with an app to better digest elixir and I have come across a tough choice.

In my user case scenario there a user can create he’s own user meal, this meal can have multiple food recipes and as it seem natural a food recipe can be part of many user meals. So how I am handling this is through a many to many association in the db layer.

UserMeal <-(RecipeUserMeal)-> Recipe

so in order to create the recipe_user_meals field of the UserMeal automatically when perssisting a UserMeal Struct I would need something like [%{recipe_id: 1} , %{recipe_id: 2}] etc ..

How I am handling that in the form creating the UserMeal I have a multiple_select so that the user can select multiple recipes if needed to associate with the particular UserMeal but the multiple_select is actually producing an array of ids like ["1", "2"] and how I am currently handling that is using a tranformation function. to convert the multiple_select content (["1", "2"]) to something the ecto can understand
([%{recipe_id: 1} , %{recipe_id: 2}]). but this converertion that needs to happen one way in whenever I am having a direction from live_view form to ecto and the other way when I am going from ecto content to live_view form kind makes my code fuzzy and difficult to understand.

So to those of you that have come across anything similar
Do you have any suggestion for me ?
Could it be that should I create my own multiple_select building on top of the Phoenix.HTML.Form one so that it feets my needs in particular ?
Am I missing something really obvious even in the db model layer that could make my life easier ?