[erlang-questions] Suggestion for the Mnesia manual

[Bill Robertson]

In section 3.3.1 (Initializing a Schema and Starting Mnesia) of the 
Mnesia manual,
there is a function similar to this...

-module(foo).
-export([init/0, init2/0, init3/0]).

-record(foo, {a, b}).
-record(bar, {a, b}).
-record(baz, {a, b}).

init() ->
    mnesia:create_table(t1, [{attributes,record_info(fields, foo)},
                             {disk_only_copies, [node()]} ]),
    mnesia:create_table(t2, [{attributes,record_info(fields, bar)},
                             {disk_only_copies, [node()]} ]),
    mnesia:create_table(t3, [{attributes,record_info(fields, baz)},
                             {disk_only_copies, [node()]} ]).

43> foo:init().
{aborted,{badarg,t3,disk_only_copies}}

The example in the manual is o.k. because it does not misspell "disc"
like my code did.  I'm new to the language, so I didn't realize what
the real problem was.  I only saw the error for the third table, and
I spent the entire afternoon trying to figure out why the third statement
failed when the first two didn't.  Of course, that wasn't the problem
at all.  I just failed to understand that I was only seeing the return
value of the last expression in the function and that they had all
failed.

I would like to suggest that the example in the Mnesia manual be
rewritten to put the table information into a list and then call
mnesia:create_table() in a list comprehension and return the result
of that.  This version returns the result of all calls, and might
save somebody new to the language some time if they base their
code off of the manual, because they would see all of their errors.

init2() ->
    Tables = [{t1, [{attributes,record_info(fields, foo)},
                    {disk_only_copies, [node()]} ]},
              {t2, [{attributes,record_info(fields, bar)},
                    {disk_only_copies, [node()]} ]},
              {t3, [{attributes,record_info(fields, baz)},
                    {disk_only_copies, [node()]} ]}],
    [create_table(Table) || Table <- Tables].

create_table(TableInfo) ->
    {Table, Args} = TableInfo,
    mnesia:create_table(Table, Args).

44> foo:init2().
[{aborted,{badarg,t1,disk_only_copies}},
 {aborted,{badarg,t2,disk_only_copies}},
 {aborted,{badarg,t3,disk_only_copies}}]

init3() ->
    Tables = [{t1, [{attributes,record_info(fields, foo)},
                    {disc_only_copies, [node()]} ]},
              {t2, [{attributes,record_info(fields, bar)},
                    {disc_only_copies, [node()]} ]},
              {t3, [{attributes,record_info(fields, baz)},
                    {disc_only_copies, [node()]} ]}],
    [create_table(Table) || Table <- Tables].

45> foo:init3().
[{atomic,ok},{atomic,ok},{atomic,ok}]

Thanks











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