facteur

Facteur allows you to add an email-like messaging system in your Rails 3 application. You can create many mailboxes for your users where they will be able to send and receive messages. Facteur supports ActiverRecord 3.0.x and Mongoid 2.0.x.

Installation

In your Gemfile add the following line :

gem 'facteur'

Then run the following command:

bundle install

Usage

First install the messaging system in your application :

rails generate facteur:install

This commands creates the migrations which creates the tables we need so don't forget to migrate your database :

rake db:migrate

Then to activate facteur in your user model, just include the addressee's model as follows :

class User < ActiveRecord::Base  
  include Facteur::AddresseeModel
end

class User
  include Mongoid::Document
  include Facteur::AddresseeModel
end

You model must be named 'User'. This will be changed in the future.

Messaging system

Creating mailboxes

In the facteur's system, each user must have a mailbox where he can receive messages. The mailboxes can be declared statically and/or dynamically. Let's start first by the static way :

class User < ActiveRecord::Base  
  include Facteur::AddresseeModel

  mailbox :private_mailbox, :default => true
  mailbox :public_mailbox
end

The previous example declare two mailboxes that will be created for each user. The mailboxes are created when they are first accessed. Facteur generates for you two methods to access your mailboxes :

# assuming that 'login' and 'password' are fields defined for the User model
@john = User.create(:login => 'john', :password => 'pass')

# Now, the mailboxes exist and they can be accessed
@john.private_mailbox #=> generates and returns the private mailbox
@john.public_mailbox #=> generates and returns the public mailbox

# To check the mailboxes which where defined
User.mailboxes #=> [{:name=>:private_mailbox, :default=>true}, {:name=>:public_mailbox}]

It is also possible to create a mailbox dynamically. This mailbox will not be available for all the users but only for the user who created it :

@john.create_mailbox(:new_mailbox) #=> true
User.mailboxes #=> [{:name=>:private_mailbox, :default=>true}, {:name=>:public_mailbox}]
@john.mailboxes #=> [{:name=>:private_mailbox, :default=>true}, {:name=>:public_mailbox}, {:name=>:new_mailbox}]

After the previous example, the "news_mailbox" is only avalaible to John. The names of the mailboxes must be unique. if you try to create a mailbox which already exists, the create_mailbox() method will return false.

Sending messages

It is possible to send a message to one or many user :

@peter = User.create(:login => 'peter', :password => 'pass')
@mary = User.create(:login => 'mary', :password => 'pass')

@john.send_message('hello', :to => @peter, :in => :private_mailbox)
@john.send_message('hello', :to => [@peter, @mary], :in => :public_mailbox)

The 'in' option is not mandatory. If it is not given, the message is delivered to the default mailbox. If there is no default mailbox defined then the method fails.

You can access the messages in a mailbox :

@peter.private_mailbox.messages

To list the messages sent by a user :

@john.sent_messages

More methods

This section list the other methods available for each elements of the messaging system :

User

mailboxes      : mailboxes assigned to this user
sent_messages  : messages sent by the user

Mailbox

addressee : who the mailbox is assigned to
messages  : messages who are stored in the mailbox
name      : the name of the mailbox

Message

mailbox     : mailbox where the message is stored
author      : user who send the message
addressees  : who the message was sent to
body        : body of the message
subject     : subject of the message
created_at  : date of creation

Testing the gem

It is possible to test facteur by running the following command from the gem directory:

rake spec

Note on Patches/Pull Requests

Fork the project.
Make your feature addition or bug fix.
Add tests for it. This is important so I don't break it in a future version unintentionally.
Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or history. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)
Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.