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>]