Intro

For newbies, it’s hard for fully understanding Elixir process (also GenServer). For easy to work with process, Elixir provides Agent module to support sharing data (state) between two or more processes.

Explain

In Elixir, every single line of code is run in a process and because Elixir is functional programming then we don’t have global variable (of course, we have a big benefit for this that is much more less side effect - From avoided using global variable).

To share data between functions we use process dictionary or pass variable as param.

But for between different processes we need more effort to share data (if not used Ets table & :persistent_term - a limited way). We need add code to send & receive a message, also we need to handle state to store global variable (can use process dictionary).

For much more convenient to sharing data between process we can use Agent for holding global data (state) to share between processes or simple between functions in different point of times in a process.

Implement a Agent

We can implement a module using Agent or directly (less convenient).

defmodule AutoId do
  use Agent

  def start_link(initial_id) do
    Agent.start_link(fn -> initial_id end, name: __MODULE__)
  end

  def last_id do
    Agent.get(__MODULE__, & &1)
  end

  def set_id(new_id) do
    Agent.update(__MODULE__, fn _old -> id end)
  end

  def new_id do
    Agent.get_and_update(__MODULE__, fn id -> {id, id + 1} end)
  end
end

In this example, we make a module to sharing a way to get unique id for all processes in system by call AudoId.new_id(). We can add to a application supervisor or manual start by call AutoId.start_link(0) before using (remember Agent process will crash if our process is crashed).

To add to a application supervisor (or our supervisor) we add code like:

children = [
  {AutoId, 0}
]

Supervisor.start_link(children, strategy: :one_for_one)

For starting manual AutoId process just add code like:

AutoId.start_link(1_000)

And in somewhere in source code we can use by call AutoId functions like:

my_id = AutoId.new_id()

#...

# reset id
AutoId.set_id(1_000_000)

other_id = AutoId.new_id()

Agent is simple enough for using and we don’t need implement GenServer or write new process for sharing data.

Agent is process then it can be hangover or overload, for in case we need get/set data (state) in limited time we can use timeout param (default is 5_000 ms).

Agent also provides config for child_spec for supervisor like GenServer & support distributed, hot code swapping for more use cases.