a t e v a n s . c o m

I was running through tutorials for Elixir + Phoenix, and got to the part where forms start showing validation failures. Specifically this code, from Pragmatic Programmers’ “Programming Phoenix” book:

<%= form_for @changeset, user_path(@conn, :create), fn f -> %> 
  <%= if f.errors != [] do %>
    <div class="alert alert-danger">
      <p>Oops, something went wrong! Please check the errors below:</p>
      <ul>
        <%= for {attr, message} <- f.errors do %>
          <li><%= humanize(attr) %> <%= message %></li>
        <% end %> 
      </ul>
    </div>
  <!-- snip -->
<% end %>

I got this error: no function clause matching in Phoenix.HTML.Safe.Tuple.to_iodata/1

Couldn’t find a bloody solution anywhere. Took a long time to find IO.inspect . The message thing turned out to be a tuple that looked made for sprintf - something like {"name can't be longer than %{count}", count: 1} , so I spent forever trying to figure out if Elixir has sprintf , looked like there might be something in :io.format() , then I had to learn about Erlang bindings, but that wasn’t…

Ended up on #elixir-lang IRC channel, and the author of the book (Chris Mccord) pointed me to the Ecto “error helpers” in this upgrade guide. It’s a breaking change in Phoenix 1.1 + Ecto 2.0. The book is (and I imagine many tutorials are) for Phoenix 1.0.x , and I had installed the latest at 1.1.0 .

Major thanks to Chris - I have literally never had a question actually get answered on IRC. It was a last-resort measure, and it really says something about the Elixir community that someone helped me figure this out.