Idiomatic function names for Elixir/Phoenix controller helpers

Question

I'm writing some get helpers in my Phoenix web app. In rails, you would generally name (or have method missing) helpers like find_account_by_email(email), etc.

With pattern matching seeming so core to Elixir/Erlang, I'm wondering if I'm better of writing my helpers like:

def get_account({email: email}) do
  # ...
end

Phoenix stubs out a get_account(id) method, so it feels to me that reusing the name with pattern matching is more idiomatic?

Sheharyar Sheharyar · Accepted Answer · 2018-11-11T23:53:03

Welcome to Stack Overflow!

While phoenix-framework might be called the "Rails for Elixir", the design patterns and the architecture considerations are very different. Exposing random functions that "might be used for a bunch of things" isn't really part of the philosophy.

But the good part is, that if your use-case does call for something like this, it's very easy to extend existing functionality using Macros, Behaviours or Protocols. For your simple use-case, you can indeed create a generic method (or a set of methods), but I would lose the tuple:

defmodule Account do
  def get(clauses) do
    Repo.get_by(Account, clauses)
  end
end

You can call it using:

Account.get(email: "[email protected]")

But I would argue if replacing one one-liner with another, truly added enough value to your codebase to warrant it.

^{Side Note: I actually created a library to add Rails-style model helpers to Ecto schemas in Elixir apps to ease-in Rails developers to Phoenix, exposing methods similar to what active-record does. Also see the note about complex queries.}

Idiomatic function names for Elixir/Phoenix controller helpers

1 Answers