When it comes to validation, I don’t like to re-invent the wheel. Many programming languages have built-in modules for common types of data, such as a URL.
In Ruby, we have the URI module which is often used to generate, parse, and manipulate a URI. It has a method URI.parse which accepts a string and creates an instance of a URI.
For a time, I thought this was a decent approach to use.
In my previous post Generating static data with Elixir comprehensions I showed how you can use comprehensions to generate static data in your Elixir application. That static data was stored as a Map in a module attribute and accessible with a function that returns the Map itself.
When building your application, you probably know how the static data will be accessed. Elixir has various ways of accessing data in a List, Keyword, or Map, and there are big differences in performance based on the size of tha data set.
A common requirement in software is to have a static data resource in your application or library. These are typically resources that changes so infrequently that releasing a new version for a data change is fine. Of course you can build these data by hand, but this is error-prone and makes rebuilding the static data more labour intensive. These problems are exacerbated by larger data sets. As good lazy (i.e. efficient) developers we can use code to solve these problems.
