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

You could also present tabular data:

character_1 = OpenStruct.new(name: 'Frank Underwood', job: 'Vice President')
character_2 = OpenStruct.new(name: 'Zoe Barnes', job: 'Reporter')
characters_list = [character_1, character_2]

iq = Question.new do |q|
  q.question = "Which House of Cards character are you interested in?"
  q.options = [characters_list, :cancel]
  q.columns = [:index, :name, :job]
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 with a table:

Which House of Cards character are you interested in? [0/1/c]
  c -- cancel
+-------+-----------------+----------------+
| index | name            | job            |
+-------+-----------------+----------------+
| 0     | Frank Underwood | Vice President |
| 1     | Zoe Barnes      | Reporter       |
+-------+-----------------+----------------+

Note that the second, and up to the last, value of the columns list are the messages that get sent to each object in the objects list of the options array.

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

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