Support for convenient meta updates

[up2jj]

We have many long-running jobs that spawn sub-jobs. We would like to track the spawning progress at a low cost and are wondering if the meta is a good place to record progress and other helpful information.

Currently, Oban does not have any top-level mechanism to update meta. I know that pure Ecto can be used for updates, but it seems to me that a helper built into Oban itself would be a much more elegant solution encapsulating the configuration, with no direct reference to a specific Oban repo:

Oban.update_meta(job, fn meta -> ... end)

Using meta along with Oban.Web would significantly improve observability and be very helpful in debugging potential issues in our case.

I would be happy to take on the task of adding such a helper, with your guidance and assistance.

[sorentwo]

We're looking at additional CRUD helpers (on the Read, Update, and Delete side, specifically). An additional function just to update meta feels too niche, though. A single update_job/3 function would be more flexible than a separate function for each updatable field.

This may be included prior to v2.19 🙂

[up2jj]

Superb! 🚀