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Using Embedded Schemas for Easy Peasy Ecto Preloading

· 2 min read

Structs in Elixir are great, they let you define some data structure and lets you do all sorts of nifty stuff like default values. But what if you want to use this particular struct inside of an Ecto query and then preload associations based on a given field?

An Example Problem​

We have a struct called Deal, which is build dynamically from an SQL query. This means that there is no table associated with our Deal structs.

We initially define it as so:

defmodule MyApp.Deal do
    defstruct total_price: nil,
              product_id: nil,
              product: nil
end

The SQL query then populates the product_id field with the id of a product that is currently on sale, as so:

from(p in Products,
  ...
  select: %Deal{total_price: sum(p.price), product_id: p.id}
)
|> Repo.all()

If we were to query this, we would get back a Deal struct as so (for example):

# for product with id=5
[%Deal{ total_price: 123.20 product_id: 5}]

All smooth sailing so far... or is it?

The Preload​

What if we wanted to load our product information onto the struct? Could we perhaps use Repo.preload/3 to help?

from(p in Products,
  ...
  select: %Deal{total_price: sum(p.price), product_id: p.id}
)
|> Repo.all()
|> Repo.preload([:product])

Trying out this updated query function out will give us this error:

 function MyApp.Deal.__schema__/2 is undefined or private

D'oh! Seems like our Deal struct does not have the schema metadata that is used by Repo.preload/3. It seems like we'll have to ditch the struct and implement a full schema backed by a table...

The Solution: Embedded Schemas To The Rescue​

The post's title kind of gave it away, but we're going to use Ecto's embedded schemas to declare our schema without actually having a table backing our schema. This allows us to declare associations with other tables, and we can then use Repo.preload/3 to load these associations automatically for us! 🤯 I know right?

Refactoring our code for our Deal struct into an embedded schema gives us this:

defmodule MyApp.Deal do
  alias MyApp.Product
  use Ecto.Schema

  embedded_schema do
    field(:total_price :float)
    belongs_to(:product, Product)
  end
end

Note that we don't have to specify both product_id and product fields, as they are automatically created with the Ecto.Schema.belongs_to/2 macro.

Now, preloading our product information works perfectly fine!