View Source Relationships

Relationships describe the connections between resources and are a core component of Ash. Defining relationships enables you to do things like

  • Loading related data
  • Filtering on related data
  • Managing related records through changes on a single resource
  • Authorizing based on the state of related data

Relationships Basics

A relationship exists between a source resource and a destination resource. These are defined in the relationships block of the source resource. For example, if MyApp.Tweet is the source resource, and MyApp.User is the destination resource, we could define a relationship called :owner like this:

defmodule MyApp.Tweet do
  use Ash.Resource,
    data_layer: my_data_layer

  attributes do
    uuid_primary_key :id
    attribute :body, :string
  end

  relationships do
    belongs_to :owner, MyApp.User
  end
end

See Managing Relationships for more information.

Kinds of relationships

There are four kinds of relationships:

Each of these relationships has a source resource and a destination resource with a corresponding attribute on the source resource (source_attribute), and destination resource (destination_attribute). Relationships will validate that their configured attributes exist at compile time.

You don't need to have a corresponding "reverse" relationship for every relationship, i.e if you have a MyApp.Tweet resource with belongs_to :user, MyApp.User you aren't required to have a has_many :tweets, MyApp.Tweet on MyApp.User. All that is required is that the attributes used by the relationship exist.

Belongs To 

# on MyApp.Tweet
belongs_to :owner, MyApp.User

A belongs_to relationship means that there is an attribute (source_attribute) on the source resource that uniquely identifies a record with a matching attribute (destination_attribute) in the destination. In the example above, the source attribute on MyApp.Tweet is :owner_id and the destination attribute on MyApp.User is :id.

Attribute Defaults

By default, the source_attribute is defined as :<relationship_name>_id of the type :uuid on the source resource and the destination_attribute is assumed to be :id. You can override the attribute names by specifying the source_attribute and destination_attribute options like so:

belongs_to :owner, MyApp.User do
  # defaults to :<relationship_name>_id (i.e. :owner_id)
  source_attribute :custom_attribute_name

  # defaults to :id
  destination_attribute :custom_attribute_name
end

You can further customize the source_attribute using options such as:

  • d:Ash.Resource.Dsl.relationships.belongs_to|define_attribute? to define it yourself
  • Ash.Resource.Dsl.relationships.belongs_to.attribute_type to modify the default type
  • d:Ash.Resource.Dsl.relationships.belongs_to|attribute_writable? to make the source attribute private?: false, writable?: true (both are not the default)

For example:

belongs_to :owner, MyApp.User do
  attribute_type :integer
  attribute_writable? true
end

Or if you wanted to define the attribute yourself,

attributes do
  attribute :owner_foo, MyApp.CustomType
end

...
relationships do
  belongs_to :owner, MyApp.User do
    define_attribute? false
    source_attribute :owner_foo
  end
end

Customizing default belongs_to attribute type

Destination attributes that are added by default are assumed to be :uuid. To change this, set the following configuration in config.exs:

config :ash, :default_belongs_to_type, :integer

See the docs for more: Ash.Resource.Dsl.relationships.belongs_to

Has One 

# on MyApp.User
has_one :profile, MyApp.Profile

A has_one relationship means that there is a unique attribute (destination_attribute) on the destination resource that identifies a record with a matching unique attribute (source_resource) in the source. In the example above, the source attribute on MyApp.User is :id and the destination attribute on MyApp.Profile is :user_id.

A has_one is similar to a belongs_to except the reference attribute is on the destination resource, instead of the source.

Attribute Defaults

By default, the source_attribute is assumed to be :id, and destination_attribute defaults to <snake_cased_last_part_of_module_name>_id.

See the docs for more: Ash.Resource.Dsl.relationships.has_one

Has Many 

# on MyApp.User
has_many :tweets, MyApp.Tweet

A has_many relationship means that there is a non-unique attribute (destination_attribute) on the destination resource that identifies a record with a matching unique attribute (source_resource) in the source. In the example above, the source attribute on MyApp.User is :id and the destination attribute on MyApp.Tweet is :user_id.

A has_many relationship is similar to a has_one because the reference attribute exists on the destination resource. The only difference between this and has_one is that the destination attribute is not unique, and therefore will produce a list of related items. In the example above, :tweets corresponds to a list of MyApp.Tweet records.

Attribute Defaults

By default, the source_attribute is assumed to be :id, and destination_attribute defaults to <snake_cased_last_part_of_module_name>_id.

See the docs for more: Ash.Resource.Dsl.relationships.has_many

Many To Many

A many_to_many relationship can be used to relate many source resources to many destination resources. To achieve this, the source_attribute and destination_attribute are defined on a join resource. A many_to_many relationship can be thought of as a combination of a has_many relationship on the source/destination resources and a belongs_to relationship on the join resource.

For example, consider two resources MyApp.Tweet and MyApp.Hashtag representing tweets and hashtags. We want to be able to associate a tweet with many hashtags, and a hashtag with many tweets. To do this, we could define the following many_to_many relationship:

# on MyApp.Tweet
many_to_many :hashtags, MyApp.Tweet do
  through MyApp.TweetHashtag
  source_attribute_on_join_resource :tweet_id
  destination_attribute_on_join_resource :hashtag_id
end

The through option specifies the "join" resource that will be used to store the relationship. We need to define this resource as well:

defmodule MyApp.TweetHashtag do
  use Ash.Resource,
    data_layer: your_data_layer

  relationships do
    belongs_to :tweet, MyApp.Tweet, primary_key?: true, allow_nil?: false
    belongs_to :hashtag, MyApp.Hashtag, primary_key?: true, allow_nil?: false
  end
end

It is convention to name this resource <source_resource_name><destination_resource_name> however this is not required. The attributes on the join resource must match the source_attribute_on_join_resource and destination_attribute_on_join_resource options on the many_to_many relationship. The relationships on the join resource are standard belongs_to relationships, and can be configured as such. In this case, we have specified that the :tweet_id and :hashtag_id attributes form the primary key for the join resource, and that they cannot be nil.

Now that we have a resource with the proper attributes, Ash will use this automatically under the hood when performing relationship operations like filtering and loading.

See the docs for more: Ash.Resource.Dsl.relationships.many_to_many

Relationships across APIs

You will need to specify the api option in the relationship if the destination resource is part of a different API:

many_to_many :authors, MyApp.OtherApi.Resource do
  api MyApp.OtherApi
  ...
end

There are two ways to load relationships:

On records

Given a single record or a set of records, it is possible to load their relationships by calling the load function on the record's parent API. For example:

# user = %User{...}
YourApi.load(user, :tweets)

# users = [%User{...}, %User{...}, ....]
YourApi.load(users, :tweets)

This will fetch the tweets for each user, and set them in the corresponding tweets key.

%User{
  ...
  tweets: [
    %Tweet{...},
    %Tweet{...},
    ...
  ]
}

See Ash.Api.load/3 for more information.

In the query

The following will return a list of users with their tweets loaded identically to the previous example:

User
|> Ash.Query.load(:tweets)
|> YourApi.read()

At present, loading relationships in the query is fundamentally the same as loading on records. Eventually, data layers will be able to optimize these loads (potentially including them as joins in the main query).

See Ash.Query.load/2 for more information.

More complex data loading

Multiple relationships can be loaded at once, i.e

YourApi.load(users, [:tweets, :followers])

Nested relationships can be loaded:

YourApi.load(users, followers: [:tweets, :followers])

The queries used for loading can be customized by providing a query as the value.

followers = Ash.Query.sort(User, follower_count: :asc)

YourApi.load(users, followers: followers)

Nested loads will be included in the parent load.

followers =
  User
  |> Ash.Query.sort(follower_count: :asc)
  |> Ash.Query.load(:followers)

# Will load followers and followers of those followers
YourApi.load(users, followers: followers)

no_attributes? true

This can be very useful when combined with multitenancy. Specifically, if you have a tenant resource like Organization, you can use no_attributes? to do things like has_many :employees, Employee, no_attributes?: true, which lets you avoid having an unnecessary organization_id field on Employee. The same works in reverse: has_one :organization, Organization, no_attributes?: true allows relating the employee to their organization.

Some important caveats here:

  1. You can still manage relationships from one to the other, but "relate" and "unrelate" will have no effect, because there are no fields to change.

  2. Loading the relationship on a list of resources will not behave as expected in all circumstances involving multitenancy. For example, if you get a list of Organization and then try to load employees, you would need to set a single tenant on the load query, meaning you'll get all organizations back with the set of employees from one tenant. This could eventually be solved, but for now it is considered an edge case.