It looks like you are trying to make your defrecord call from inside of a function like:

def  somefunction() do
  Record.defrecord :record_name...
  …
end

The error says the defrecord call must be moved out of the function, presumably to the level of the module.

IIRC defrecord defines a record, it does not create an instance. Pretty much the same as -record(Name, {...}). in Erlang.

You are right, and Record.extract/2 extracts a keywordlist from a *.hrl, which can be used in Record.defrecord.

But it seems as if he were trying to extract a record from a dependency, so it should be :from_lib instead of :from.

Additionally what @easco said seems to be valid as well:

** (ArgumentError) cannot invoke defmacro/2 inside function/macro

Proof:

iex(1)> defmodule M do              
...(1)>   require Record
...(1)>   def foo() do
...(1)>     Record.defrecord(:foo, [bar: 0])
...(1)>   end
...(1)> end
  iex:1

** (ArgumentError) cannot invoke defmacro/2 inside function/macro
    (elixir) lib/kernel.ex:5150: Kernel.assert_no_function_scope/3
    (elixir) lib/kernel.ex:3906: Kernel.define/4
    (elixir) expanding macro: Kernel.defmacro/2
    iex:5: M.foo/0
    (elixir) expanding macro: Record.defrecord/2
    iex:5: M.foo/0

As you can see, the errormessage has the same shape.

Thanks for responses guys.
Yep, I’m a bit of an idiot.

easco is right, I had put this in a function whereas it should have been at module level. I corrected this and it was fine.

The next thing I am trying to do is populate the record that has been defined.

In Erlang I can do this by doing the following (I need them to go into a list hence the square brackets):

things = [#thing{name = “bob”, age = 30, job = “Elixir Dev”}]

I thought I could do it something like this based on research but I’m probably/most likely wrong (this is without it being a list):

thing2 = thing.new(
name = “bob”,
age = 30,
job = “Elixir Dev”)

Can you please show the line how you are extracting the record?

And how are you specifiying the dependency in your mixfile?