How would you handle real-time channel messages initiated by a non-phoenix application

Questions & Help Questions
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I’m using an umbrella application to give some structure to the code.

Imagine the following general structure

- apps/sales (domain specific application with ecto)
- apps/web_interface (Phoenix application)
  - WebInterface.UserChannel (Phoenix Channel)
  - WebInterface.SaleView (Phoenix View)
  - has a dependency on the sales application

Now when an event such as a new sale occurs in the sales application, I’d like to trigger a message to a user on the WebInterface.UserChannel that is rendered as JSON via the WebInterface.SaleView. But I have to problems:

  1. The web _interface application depends on the sales application so I am unable to make a direct call (since I don’t want a circular dependency). I can create a generic callback method so that I can send any messages I want (e.g. with this approach Best practice for calling a function in another application without defining a dependency) but I don’t really want the sales application to be able to send any message, just a limited subset
  2. Since the Phoenix Views are contained in the web_interface the sales application cannot render the sale to JSON by itself.

Since everything (or nearly) everything in these applications are JSON-based rather than HTML-based I’m also starting to question if Phoenix Views are even necessary. Maybe I should just define modules in the sales application that return a purely map/array based rendering of the data.

Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions?