I have been working on a platform where we have to manage some kind of documents and particularly the versioning. I have the rest of the platform up and running with most of the stuff done but here come the central piece: The document management.

For the POC I did something simple for testing in the lights of:

  schema "documents" do
    field :title, :string
    field :body, :string
    belongs_to :organisation, MyApp.Organisations.Organisation

    timestamps(type: :utc_datetime)
  end

It works well - we validated our idea and are now going to the next step.

But now comes the part where I will need to manage versions and state of the documents.

I came up with something like this:

  schema "documents" do
    # more fields
    field :draft_version, :integer
    field :published_version, :integer
    belongs_to :organisation, MyApp.Organisations.Organisation

    timestamps(type: :utc_datetime)
  end

  schema "document_versions" do
    field :title, :string
    field :body, :string
    field :version, :integer

    # this has_one doesn't work and I think I will change it to belongs_to
    has_one :author, MyApp.Accounts.User
    belongs_to :document, MyApp.Documents.Document

    timestamps(type: :utc_datetime)
  end

It looks OK I guess. We will not have millions of documents and with index on the version with version/document I guess that will work.

But now comes the time to have the forms. A “new” document will basically create a document and the first version. “Edit” a document will create a new version (loading the content from the previous version) for a document.

I have been struggling with that side. I am using live_view from the frontend and I started to look for embedded forms to get that going.
That’s where I stumbled upon the embedded_schemas… I was wondering if this would be actually a fit for my use-case. I am still relatively new in Elixir/Phoenix/Ecto and learning around that. What would be the recommendation for a case like this?