has_messages
has_messages
demonstrates a reference implementation for sending messages between users.
Resources
API
Bugs
Development
Source
-
git://github.com/pluginaweek/has_messages.git
Description
Messaging between users is fairly common in web applications, especially those that support social networking. Messaging doesn’t necessarily need to be between users, but can also act as a way for the web application to send notices and other notifications to users.
Designing and building a framework that supports this can be complex and takes away from the business focus. This plugin can help ease that process by demonstrating a reference implementation of these features.
Usage
Installation
has_messages
requires additional database tables to work. You can generate a migration for these tables like so:
rails g
Then simply migrate your database:
rake db:migrate
Adding message support
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
end
This will build the following associations:
-
messages
-
unsent_messages
-
sent_messages
-
received_messages
If you have more specific needs, you can create the same associations manually that has_messages
builds. See HasMessages::MacroMethods#has_messages for more information about the asssociations that are generated from this macro.
Creating new messages
= user..build
.to user1, user2
.subject = 'Hey!'
.body = 'Does anyone want to go out tonight?'
.deliver
Replying to messages
reply = .reply_to_all
reply.body = "I'd love to go out!"
reply.deliver
Forwarding messages
forward = .forward
forward.body = 'Interested?'
forward.deliver
Processing messages asynchronously
In addition to delivering messages immediately, you can also queue messages so that an external application processes and delivers them. This is especially useful for messages that need to be sent outside of the confines of the application.
To queue messages for external processing, you can use the queue
event, rather than deliver
. This will indicate to any external processes that the message is ready to be sent.
To process queued emails, you need an external cron job that checks and sends them like so:
Message.with_state('queued').each do ||
.deliver
end
Testing
Before you can run any tests, the following gem must be installed:
To run against a specific version of Rails:
rake test RAILS_FRAMEWORK_ROOT=/path/to/rails
Dependencies
-
Rails 2.3 or later