Ruby-on-rails – How tomplement a Friendship Model in Rails 3 for a Social Networking Application

activerecordhas-many-throughrubyruby-on-rails

I'm currently working on a small social networking application and right now I'm trying to create a model that represents friendships between users. This is what I came up with so far:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base

  # ...
  has_many :friendships
  has_many :friends, :through => :friendships

end

class Friendship < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :user
  belongs_to :friend, :class_name => 'User'
end

My friendship model has a field confirmed as boolean which I'd like to use
to define a friendship as pending or confirmed.

How can I access all pending request for a certain user? Can I somehow define
this using Rails' scope method? Something like

current_user.friendships.requests # => [Friendship, Friendship, ...]

would be great.

How can I make this association bidirectional? Do I simply add another
friendship once one has confirmed a friend request such that my friendship
table would look similar to this:

| user_id | friend_id | confirmed |
-----------------------------------
| 1       | 2         | true      |
| 2       | 1         | true      |

Best Answer

To access all pending friendships you can use an association:

has_many :pending_friends,
         :through => :friendships,
         :source => :friend,
         :conditions => "confirmed = 0"  # assuming 0 means 'pending'

To make the friendship bidirectional, you may want to replace your boolean confirmed column with a string status column that has one of the following three values: 'pending', 'requested' and 'accepted' (optionally 'rejected'). This will help keep track of who made the friendship request.

When a friendship request is sent (say from Foo to Bar), you create two friendship records (encapsulated in a transaction): one requested and one pending to reflect resp. that Bar has a requested friendship from Foo and Foo has a pending friendship with Bar.

  def self.request(user, friend)
    unless user == friend or Friendship.exists?(user, friend)
      transaction do
        create(:user => user, :friend => friend, :status => 'pending')
        create(:user => friend, :friend => user, :status => 'requested')
      end
    end
  end

When the friendship is accepted (e.g. by Bar), both friendship records are set to accepted.

  def self.accept(user, friend)
    transaction do
      accepted_at = Time.now
      accept_one_side(user, friend, accepted_at)
      accept_one_side(friend, user, accepted_at)
    end
  end

  def self.accept_one_side(user, friend, accepted_at)
    request = find_by_user_id_and_friend_id(user, friend)
    request.status = 'accepted'
    request.accepted_at = accepted_at
    request.save!
  end

This is largely covered in chapter 14 of the Railspace book by Michael Hartl and Aurelius Prochazka. Here's the source code which should help you refine your solution.

Related Solutions

R – Best way to model a user’s “friendship” with different entities

Do not use :through, use :as=>friendable instead in polymorphic has_many relationship

Ruby-on-rails – Rails: How to rename a database column in a Ruby on Rails migration

rename_column :table, :old_column, :new_column

You'll probably want to create a separate migration to do this. (Rename FixColumnName as you will.):

script/generate migration FixColumnName
# creates  db/migrate/xxxxxxxxxx_fix_column_name.rb

Then edit the migration to do your will:

# db/migrate/xxxxxxxxxx_fix_column_name.rb
class FixColumnName < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    rename_column :table_name, :old_column, :new_column
  end

  def self.down
    # rename back if you need or do something else or do nothing
  end
end

For Rails 3.1 use:

While, the up and down methods still apply, Rails 3.1 receives a change method that "knows how to migrate your database and reverse it when the migration is rolled back without the need to write a separate down method".

See "Active Record Migrations" for more information.

rails g migration FixColumnName

class FixColumnName < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    rename_column :table_name, :old_column, :new_column
  end
end

If you happen to have a whole bunch of columns to rename, or something that would have required repeating the table name over and over again:

rename_column :table_name, :old_column1, :new_column1
rename_column :table_name, :old_column2, :new_column2
...

You could use change_table to keep things a little neater:

class FixColumnNames < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    change_table :table_name do |t|
      t.rename :old_column1, :new_column1
      t.rename :old_column2, :new_column2
      ...
    end
  end
end

Then just db:migrate as usual or however you go about your business.

For Rails 4:

While creating a Migration for renaming a column, Rails 4 generates a change method instead of up and down as mentioned in the above section. The generated change method is:

$ > rails g migration ChangeColumnName

which will create a migration file similar to:

class ChangeColumnName < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    rename_column :table_name, :old_column, :new_column
  end
end

Best Answer

Related Solutions

R – Best way to model a user’s “friendship” with different entities

Ruby-on-rails – Rails: How to rename a database column in a Ruby on Rails migration

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