Popular

Popular is a friendship gem designed for Rails/ActiveRecord models.

• RubyGems: ( https://rubygems.org/gems/popular )
• Website: ( http://thejchap.github.io/popular )
• RDoc: ( http://rubydoc.info/github/thejchap/popular/master/frames )

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'popular'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install popular

Database Migration

Popular uses a friendships table to store friendship relationships. To get up and running, use the following command:

rails g popular:migration
rake db:migrate

Usage

Model

To get started using Popular, simply add popular to your model, (ie: app/models/user.rb)

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  popular
end

@sam = User.create name: "Samuel"
@jackson = User.create name: "Jackson"

# Adding and removing friends
@sam.friends_with? @jackson         #=> false
@sam.friended_by? @jackson          #=> false

@sam.befriend @jackson
@sam.friends_with? @jackson         #=> true

@sam.unfriend @jackson
@sam.friends_with? @jackson         #=> false

@jackson.befriend @sam
@sam.friended_by? @jackson          #=> true

@sam.befriend @jackson
@sam.mutual_friends_with? @jackson  #=> true

Aliases

In Popular, befriend is synonomous with follow, so if it better fits the context of your application, you can use follow methods/relations instead. For example:

@sam.follow @jackson
@sam.following? @jackson          #=> true

@jackson.follow @sam
@sam.followers.include? @jackson  #=> true

Callbacks

Popular provides callbacks that are fired around friendship creation. Available callbacks are:

• after_befriend
• before_befriend
• after_unfriend
• before_unfriend

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  popular
  after_befriend :notify_friendship_created
  after_unfriend :notify_unfriended

  def notify_friendship_created
    puts "Friendship created successfully"
  end

  def notify_unfriended
    puts ":("
  end
end

@justin = User.create name: "Justin"
@jenny = User.create name: "Jenny"

@justin.befriend @jenny #=> "Friendship created successfully"
@justin.unfriend @jenny #=> ":("

Related gems

If Popular isn't quite what you're looking for, here are some other useful gems in the same category:

• Amistad ( https://github.com/raw1z/amistad )
• Friendable ( https://github.com/yuki24/friendable )

Disclaimer: I have not used either of the above gems

Resources

Popular was heavily inspired by this screencast: ( http://railscasts.com/episodes/163-self-referential-association?view=asciicast )

Contributing

1. Fork it ( http://github.com/thejchap/popular/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 new Pull Request