Interactive

This is a helper module to assist in interactive question-answering events in the command line.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'interactive'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install interactive

Usage

Questions Without any Options

If you want to ask a user a question accepting all answers:

require 'interactive'
include Interactive

question = Question.new do |q|
  q.question = "What is your api token password?"
end

question.ask do |response|
  # response is an object that responds to string methods
  puts response.split
end

This will ask:

=> What are your project ids?

You can respond like so, for example:

$ 123someid hello4545 12992hhoo

That will give us the following:

=> 123someid
   hello4545
   12992hhoo

Questions With Lazy Shortcut Explanations

If you want to ask a user a question expecting certain answers:

require 'interactive'
include Interactive

question = Question.new do |q|
  q.question = "Which item do you want to use?"
  q.options = [1..3, :cancel, :quit]
end

You can run the loop and wait for a valid response and do query methods on the response:

question.ask do |response|
  if response.whole_num_1?
    # do stuff if user responded with "1"
  elsif response.whole_num?
    # do stuff if user responded with "1", "2", or "3"
  elsif response.cancel?
    # do stuff if user responded with "c", etc.
  elsif response.quit?
    # do stuff if user responded with "q", etc.
  end
end

That will ask the question appended by the shortcuts (without full explanation):

Which item do you want to use? [1/2/3/c/q]

If the response is valid:

$ a  # response.add? will return true

If the response is invalid, it prints out the question and goes into detail as to what the shortcuts stand for:

$ bad-response

Which item do you want to use? [1/2/3/c/q]
  1 -- 1
  2 -- 2
  3 -- 3
  c -- cancel
  q -- quit

Questions With Eager Shortcut Explanations

Providing an array of options to the options array will trigger the shortcut explanation right after asking the question:

require 'interactive'
include Interactive

# ...

options_list = ["/some/path", "/some/other/path"]
iq = Question.new do |q|
  q.question = "Which path do you want to use?"
  q.options = [options_list, :cancel]
end

iq.ask do |response|
  if response.whole_number?
    # response.to_i will convert the response string to an integer.
    # useful for getting the index (i.e. options_list[response.to_i])
  elsif response.cancel?
    # do stuff to cancel...
  end
end

This will ask the question and show the explanation eagerly:

Which path do you want to use? [0/1/c]
  0 -- /some/path
  1 -- /some/other/path
  c -- cancel

Question#reask

require 'interactive'
include Interactive

outer_question = Question.new do |q|
  q.question = "What do you want to do?"
  q.options = [:eat, :sleep, :bathe]
end

inner_question = Question.new do |q|
  q.question = "What do you want to eat?"
  q.options = [:spaghetti, :mac_and_cheese, :back]
end

outer_question.ask do |outer_response|
  if outer_response.eat?
    inner_question.ask do |inner_response|
      if inner_response.back?
        outer_question.reask!
      end
    end
  end
end

Assume we answer e and b, for eat and back:

What do you want to do? [e/s/b]
e
What do you want to eat? [s/m/b]
b
What do you want to do? [e/s/b]
...

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release to create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/edderic/interactive/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request