Programming Ecto

Other Ways to Use Queries

The Query module can be used for more than just reading data. We can use queries in some of the other *all functions we looked at in the last chapter. This allows us to perform update and delete operations on a specific collection of records. Let’s take a look.

In the last chapter, we updated all the timestamps in the artists table with this code:

priv/examples/query_14.exs

Repo.update_all("artists", set: [updated_at: DateTime.utc_now])

In that example, we passed the table name as a String in the first parameter. But if you look at the documentation for update_all you’ll see that this function does not expect a String but rather our new friend Ecto.Queryable. This means that you can also pass in a query, ...