This guide is an introduction to Ecto Entity, the missing Phoenix Ecto package to achieve +80% of common operations less than 20% of effort it would normally take. Ecto Entity provides a standardized API and a set of abstractions for interacting with database tables, so that your phoenix Elixir developers can focus on what's specific to your project.
In this guide, we're going to learn some basics about Ecto Entity, such as creating, reading, updating and destroying records from a database. If you want to see the code from this guide, you can view it at kamaroly/ecto_entity on GitHub.
This guide will require you to have setup Entity beforehand.
To add Entity to your application, The first step is to add Entity to your mix.exs
file,
which we'll do by changing the deps
definition in that file to this:
defp deps do
[
{:ecto_entity, "~> 1.0.0"}
]
end
Then, to install it, you will run this command:
mix deps.get
Ecto Entity needs to know what repository to use while running database query. To do that, add config :ecto_entity, app_name: :your_app_name
to your config/config.exs
file.
:your_app_name
will be often the app configured in mix.exs
under project
> app
.
import Config
# Configure your APP name so that Ecto Entity can know
# What Ecto Repo to use for the entity
config :ecto_entity, app_name: :your_ecto_elixir_app_name
To start off with, we'll need to include Entity
in our existing Phoenix Schema using use Ecto.Entity
in your Schema module, like the following:
defmodule MyApp.Person do
import Ecto.Changeset
use Ecto.Schema
use Ecto.Entity # Include Entity in your normal schema
schema "people" do
field :first_name, :string
field :last_name, :string
field :age, :integer
end
def changeset(entity, attrs) do
entity
|> cast(attrs, [:first_name, :last_name])
|> validate_required([:first_name, :last_name])
end
end
NOTE: You must define a
changeset/2
function to create and update your schema