I find myself writing this code repeatedly. Is there a better way if Status.exists?(entity) do Status.update(entity, new_value) else Status.add(entity, new_value) end

Can you provide a bit more context about what could be “better” in your view? Obviously you could wrap that code in a function and call that function instead, but I assume you are looking for something a bit more sophisticated?

Something out of the box provided by the ECSx.Component. maybe add the wrapper method you suggested to the ECSx.Component macro maybe update would add it if it didn’t exist. If there’s a need to raise errors from update if doesn’t exist, include an update! function maybe add would update i…

Ironically, :ets has only a single insert that either adds or updates (overwrites). As you can see in the sauce the main difference between add and update is essentially just a guard to prevent existing elements from being overwritten, or non-existing elements from being auto-created. There’s no up…

As @smathy pointed out, :ets inserts generally allow overwrites, and this was originally how ECSx worked as well, with just a single add operation that covered both cases. The reason we separated into two functions, is because of component persistence. Take the following case: HitPoints.add(playe…

Makes sense. Did you consider storing the opts in ETS along with the value?

The opts are stored in ETS. It’s not an implementation issue, it’s an API issue - with only one function for both add and update, it becomes ambiguous whether a user is leaving off the options because they want the options to stay the same, or if the lack of options means that they want the default…

Oh I see what you’re getting at. I’m not sure people would expect that though (ie. that leaving options off for an existing entity would change it to the default). Also, right now the current API doesn’t let them change the options of an existing entity at all, so you wouldn’t lose any functionalit…

Also, right now the current API doesn’t let them change the options of an existing entity at all This isn’t guaranteed to be the case forever. so you wouldn’t lose any functionality with an add that just left the opts as-is for an existing entity when the caller left them off… if they wanted th…

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Add or update function?

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smathy February 5, 2024, 10:17pm 10

Understood.