Notifiers

Built-in Notifiers

• PubSub: Ash.Notifier.PubSub

Creating a notifier

A notifier is a simple extension that must implement a single callback notify/1 . Notifiers do not have to implement an Ash DSL extension, but they may in order to configure how that notifier should behave. See Ash.Notifier.Notification for the currently available fields. Notifiers should not do anything intensive synchronously. If any heavy work needs to be done, they should delegate to something else to handle the notification, like sending it to a GenServer or GenStage. Eventually, there may be built in notifiers that will make setting up a GenStage that reacts to your resource changes easy. Until then, you’ll have to write your own.

For more information on creating a DSL extension to configure your notifier, see the docs for Spark.Dsl.Extension .

Example notifier

defmodule ExampleNotifier do
  use Ash.Notifier

  def notify(%Ash.Notifier.Notification{resource: resource, action: %{type: :create}, actor: actor}) do
    if actor do
      Logger.info("#{actor.id} created a #{resource}")
    else
      Logger.info("A non-logged in user created a #{resource}")
    end
  end
end

Including a notifier in a resource

When you need your notifier to also be an extension:

defmodule MyResource do
  use Ash.Resource,
    notifiers: [ExampleNotifier]
end

When your notifier is not an extension, include it this way to avoid a compile time dependency:

defmodule MyResource do
  use Ash.Resource
	
	resource do
	  simple_notifiers [ExampleNotifier]
  end
end

Transactions

API calls involving resources who’s datalayer supports transactions (like Postgres), notifications are saved up and sent after the transaction is closed. For example, the api call below ultimately results in many many database calls.

Post
|> Ash.Changeset.new(%{})
|> Ash.Changeset.manage_relationship(:related_posts, [1, 2, 3], type: :append)
|> Ash.Changeset.manage_relationship(:related_posts, [4, 5], type: :remove)
|> Ash.Changeset.manage_relationship(:comments, [10], type: :append)
|> Api.update!()

Ash doesn’t support bulk database operations yet, so it performs the following operations:

• a read of the currently related posts
• a read of the currently related comments
• a creation of a post_link to relate to 1
• a creation of a post_link to relate to 2
• a creation of a post_link to relate to 3
• a destruction of the post_link related to 4
• a destruction of the post_link related to 5
• an update to comment 10, to set its post_id to this post

If all three of these resources have notifiers configured, we need to send a notification for each operation (notifications are not sent for reads). For data consistency reasons, if a data layer supports transactions, all writes are done in a transaction. However, if you try to read the record from the database that you have just received a notification about before the transaction has been closed, in a different process, the information will be wrong. For this reason, Ash accumulates notifications until they can be sent.

If you need to perform multiple operations against your resources in your own transaction, you will have to handle that case yourself. To support this, c:Ash.Api.create/2 , c:Ash.Api.update/2 and c:Ash.Api.destroy/2 support a return_notifications?: true option. This causes the api call to return {:ok, result, notifications} in the successful case. Here is an example of how you might use it.

result =
  Ash.DataLayer.transaction(resource, fn ->
    {:ok, something, notifications1} = create_something()
    {:ok, result, notifications2} = create_another_thing(something)
    {:ok, notifications3} = destroy_something(something)

    {result, Enum.concat([notifications1, notifications2, notifications3])}
  end)

case result do
  {:ok, value, notifications} ->
     Ash.Notifier.notify(notifications)

     value
  {:error, error} ->
    handle_error(error)
end