I remember as I was working my way through the "Programming Phoenix" book, I felt that the whole idea of "context" modules seemed like an unnecessary indirection. Why put all those functions in a separate module instead of just doing the work in the controller? In my initial use cases I'd end up with an AccountController that just calls a function in the Accounts module which in turn uses the User module to actually interact with the database.
Once I actually started building stuff and writing tests I had my aha-moment. By putting most of my logic in a separate 'context' module, I could both use and test all that without having to do all the bootstrapping that was necessary to run the web-framework controller logic.
While this might seem obvious to some, for me it felt like a proper level-up as a developer, as I suddenly realized how the same principle could be applied in other contexts.
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I remember as I was working my way through the "Programming Phoenix" book, I felt that the whole idea of "context" modules seemed like an unnecessary indirection. Why put all those functions in a separate module instead of just doing the work in the controller? In my initial use cases I'd end up with an AccountController that just calls a function in the Accounts module which in turn uses the User module to actually interact with the database.
Once I actually started building stuff and writing tests I had my aha-moment. By putting most of my logic in a separate 'context' module, I could both use and test all that without having to do all the bootstrapping that was necessary to run the web-framework controller logic.
While this might seem obvious to some, for me it felt like a proper level-up as a developer, as I suddenly realized how the same principle could be applied in other contexts.