IndifferentAccess

So, clearly this is inspired by HashWithIndifferentAccess from ActiveSupport, and I’m not at all sure it’s a good or idiomatic idea in Elixir, but I wanted to play with it and get some community reaction/thoughts. I want some kind of handling to happen at the boundaries of my application that imposes some guarantees deeper into business logic, and I’d prefer not to litter my codebase with a lot of string literals. I haven’t seen any kind of cohesive pattern for handling the transition from strings at the boundaries to mostly-atoms inside, and I wanted to play with something that might be a better alternative.

At this stage it’s a proof of concept without tests but that appears to work reasonably well as a plug in a Phoenix app locally. Before I put any more time into maturing it, I wanted to give others a chance to react to the general idea and perhaps educate me about alternative patterns/problems with this approach/etc. Obviously not reccomended for production use at this point, but PR’s and Issues are welcome.

Installation

The package can be installed by adding indifferent_access to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:indifferent_access, "~> 0.1.0"}
  ]
end

Documentation can be generated with ExDoc and published on HexDocs. Once published, the docs can be found at https://hexdocs.pm/indifferent_access.