As promised, in the latest version I’ve converted some of the data structures into Ecto schemas. For extra learning, I put off actually setting up a Repo, and used embedded_schema for everything. It was pretty cool how easy it that was to accomplish.
On the LiveView side, this separation naturally created some separation in the UI, between the phase when a timer is being created and when it is being viewed/used. I took advantage of this by separating the form UI into a separate component. I began by trying to keep the change as incremental as possible by using LiveComponent to ‘embed’ the form into the timer view like it worked before, but that proved really awkward with the timer event handling. Again, this probably mostly shows that the timer logic shouldn’t be in Elixir at all and in a real application I probably would have converted it to JS at this time (if I hadn’t started there, which I almost certainly would have). But another easy solution was just to add a new top level live view for the timer, which I wanted anyway so that there would be a unique URL users could visit to reuse the same timer. Since this still isn’t backed by a DB, I added a simple Agent to store uuids.
Next step will probably be added some style/UI sugar so it’s a bit more usable, then maybe think about more permanent storage options. Rather than a relational DB, one option I’m considering is just adding a JSON export/import.
