Virtual Fields With Ecto Schemas

If you'd like to include a particular key-value pair in an Ecto changeset, it needs to be included as a field in the schema. In the case of something akin to a password field, you want to be able to perform validations against it, but the password itself does not have a column in the database. In other words, you want to use the password in memory as part of the validation process but not save it to the database. To accomplish this, you need to specify that it is a virtual field.

schema "users" do
  field :username, :string
  field :password_digest, :string
  field :password, :string, virtual: true
end

With that schema, you can then validate the :password and transform it into the corresponding :password_digest field.

def registration_changeset(model, params) do
  model
  |> changeset(params)                  # do other standard validations
  |> cast(params, [:password])          # include :password in the changeset
  |> validate_length(:password, min: 8) # validations
  |> put_pass_hash()                    # transform into :password_digest
end