party_boy
Models relationships between AR models. Allows you to follow, friend, and block other AR’s. Consists of two mixins: acts_as_followable and acts_as_friend. These options allow an AR to inherit either a twitter-like follower system or a facebook-like friend system.
Installation
If you’re running rails 2 use gem version 0.3.2 or the rails-2 branch.
Install the gem
gem install party_boy
Run the generator
rails generate party_boy
This will generate a migration file as well as the necessary Relationship class in your models folder.
Usage
Setup
Add the appropriate mixin to your models:
class Waterboy < ActiveRecord::Base
...
acts_as_followable
...
end
class Quarterback < ActiveRecord::Base
...
acts_as_friend
...
end
acts_as_follower
To allow a model (A) to follow another (B), add acts_as_follow to at least model A. Now, you can follow any other model in your project:
a = Waterboy.find 1
b = Quarterback.find 2
a.follow(b)
To stop following, simply just:
a.unfollow(b)
Or to block the relationship:
b.block(a)
To find out if there is a relationship between two models, use the methods:
a.following?(b)
b.followed_by?(a)
To retrieve a set of models based on the relationships, use:
a.following
b.followers
STI
STI is also handled by party_boy. The relationship is always stored using the super-most class. However, relationships to inheriting classes can also be retrieved. Do so by passing in the type:
class Quarterback < User; end
class Cheerleader < User; end
class Waterboy < User; end
In string form
a.followers('users')
=> [#<User id: 1, created_at: "2010-01-27 01:09:42", updated_at: "2010-01-27 01:09:42">]
a.following('quarterbacks')
=> [#<Quarterback id: 3, created_at: "2010-01-27 01:09:42", updated_at: "2010-01-27 01:09:42">]
Or in class form
a.followers(User)
=> [#<User id: 1, created_at: "2010-01-27 01:09:42", updated_at: "2010-01-27 01:09:42">]
b.following(Quarterback)
=> [#<Quarterback id: 3, created_at: "2010-01-27 01:09:42", updated_at: "2010-01-27 01:09:42">]
STI - part deux
On top of accessing relationships through followers / following methods, party_boy will dynamically filter the results based on the combined class name:
a.quarterback_followers # returns all followers of type quarterback
b.cheerleader_followers # returns all followers of type cheerleader
a.following_quarterbacks # returns all the quarterbacks 'a' is following
b.following_cheerleaders # returns all the cheerleaders 'b' is following
acts_as_friend
To allow two models to become friends (requiring acceptance), add acts_as_friend to both. Now you can create a relationship between the two models by:
class Bob < ActiveRecord::Base
acts_as_friend
end
class Joe < ActiveRecord::Base
acts_as_friend
end
b = Bob.create
j = Joe.create
b.request_friendship(j)
b.pending?(j)
=> true
b.outgoing_friend_requests # or j.incoming_friend_requests
=> [#<Relationship id: 1, :requestor_id: 1, :requestor_type: 'Bob', requestee_id: 1, requestee_type: 'Joe', restricted: true>]
j.accept_friendship(b)
b.friends
=> [#<Joe id: 1>]
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 Mike Nelson. See LICENSE for details.