elixir initialise struct with another struct - struct

Question

What if I have the following struct:
%Registration{email: "john#gmail.com", first_name: "John", last_name: "Doe"}
And I want to create two different structs from it:
%Account{email: "john#gmail.com", password: nil, ...}
%Profile{first_name: "John", last_name: "Doe", age: nil, ...}
I have already taken a look at this question, but if I do
registration = %Registration{email: "john#gmail.com", first_name: "John", last_name: "Doe"}
struct(Account, registration)
I receive protocol Enumerable not implemented for %Registration{...
So I have to use Map.from_struct
registration = %Registration{email: "john#gmail.com", first_name: "John", last_name: "Doe"}
struct(Account, Map.from_struct(registration))
But I think it is not very clean. So I was just thinking is there a better way to do this? This should be quite a common problem, right?

Answer 1

As per the documentation:
Converts a struct to map.
It accepts the struct module or a struct itself and simply removes the
struct field from the struct.
The function exists for a reason. I don't see the way you did it as being a problem really. If it is a common problem I haven't seen it before. If you want to have a more expressive or cleaner code you may try:
registration = %Registration{email: "john#gmail.com", first_name: "John", last_name: "Doe"} |> Map.from_struct
struct(Account, registration)
or other equivalent code by checking the docs here.

Answer 2

You can do it easily, but in a bit hacky way - just delegate protocol functions to Enumerable.Map:
defmodule Contact do
defstruct [:name, group: "", version: "", status: :latent]
defimpl Enumerable, for: Contact do
defdelegate([count(e), member?(e, m), reduce(e, a, f)],
to: Enumerable.Map)
end
end
or in a bit more proper way like
defmodule Contact do
defstruct [:name, group: "", version: "", status: :latent]
defimpl Enumerable do
alias Enumerable, as: E
def count(c), do: Map.from_struct(c) |> E.count()
def member?(c, m), do: Map.from_struct(c) |> E.member?(m)
def reduce(c, a, f), do: Map.from_struct(c) |> E.reduce(a, f)
end
end
Enumerable.count implementation can be generated with macro to return struct members count which is already known at compile time.
Enumerable.member? can also be generated with macro or written by hand or delegated again to Enumerable.Map.member? to remove runtime penalty of Map.from_struct.
All the code above is generic so it can be placed to use-able module like
defmodule StructEnumerable do
defmacro __using__(opts \\ []) do
quote do
defimpl Enumerable do
alias Enumerable, as: E
def count(c), do: Map.from_struct(c) |> E.count()
def member?(c, m), do: Map.from_struct(c) |> E.member?(m)
def reduce(c, a, f), do: Map.from_struct(c) |> E.reduce(a, f)
end
# you can also add following code
# to provide Fetch behaviour implementation
# for your structs
defdelegate([
fetch(t, k),
get_and_update(t, k, l)
], to: Map)
end
end
end
and embed it like
defmodule Contact do
defstruct [:name, group: "", version: "", status: :latent]
use StructEnumerable
end