How to implement setters on Ecto models (or Elixir structs)

Question

I'm coming from a Rails mindset and am used to adding lots of setters to ActiveRecord models to trim/lowercase strings (e.g. email addresses) or normalize phone numbers to use "-" as separators. I like the setter method because it keeps code that modifies the record DRY. Is this possible with Elixir/Ecto?

Answer 1

Currently, there is no mechanism. The best you can do is to create a function like:

User.normalize(%User{}, conn.params["user"])

Right now, we are planning to move this code to custom types. So for example you implement an e-mail type that knows how to properly cast and normalize the data, and casting would work on Ecto queries and when assigning field values.