Autoalias

Find yourself typing long module names when debugging something in iex? Or creating aliases for lots of modules just to test simple query? This library can help you!

NOTE: you'll probably want to use .iex.exs file instead in most cases.

Installation

Available via Hex package, just add autoalias to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:autoalias, "~> 0.2.0", only: :dev}
  ]
end

Usage

Simply type use Autoalias in the iex shell and it will (try) to alias every accessible module. For example:

Before:

iex -S mix phx.server

iex(1)> MyApplication.Repo.get(MyApplication.SomeContext.SomeModule, 1) \
...(1)> |> MyApplication.SomeContext.SomeModule.changeset(%{foo: :bar}) \
...(1)> |> MyApplication.Repo.update()

After:

iex -S mix phx.server

iex(1)> use Autoalias
iex(2)> Repo.get(SomeModule, 1) \
...(2)> |> SomeModule.changeset(%{foo: :bar}) \
...(2)> |> Repo.update()

NOTE: you should not use it in your code, it's built only for simplifying iex experience.

Check out the docs for more info.

Conflicts

If we have several modules with the same ending and alias all of them, only last one will be accepted. For this lib it will be the longest accessible module with particular ending, all others will be aliased by their parents. Conflicts solving performs recursively till there will be no conflict at all.

For example if there is modules like Foo.Bar.SomeModule and Baz.Qux.Corge.SomeModule it will alias the longest module, and closest parent for all conflicted modules. In this case it will be:

alias Baz.Qux.Corge.SomeModule
alias Foo.Bar

So we can now use SomeModule to access first one and Bar.SomeModule for the second.

Here is the corner case when conflict appears with one-word module, e.g. SomeModule and MyApp.SomeModule. In this case it will create alias for MyApp.SomeModule and you will loose direct access to one-word SomeModule module. If this happened, you can prepend module with Elixir. prefix, like Elixir.SomeModule, to access it. Elixir module itself cannot be aliased at all.

This cases are pretty rare, but it can happen.

Contributing

If there is any problems or suggestions, you can always open issue or pull request.