actsasfavoritor

actsasfavoritor is a Rubygem to allow any ActiveRecord model to associate any other model including the option for multiple relationships per association with scopes.

You are able to differentiate followers, favorites, watchers, votes and whatever else you can imagine through a single relationship. This is accomplished by a double polymorphic relationship on the Favorite model. There is also built in support for blocking/un-blocking favorite records as well as caching.

This Medium article gives a good introduction to this gem.

Installation

You can add actsasfavoritor to your

Gemfile

gem 'acts_as_favoritor'

And then run:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install acts_as_favoritor

If you always want to be up to date fetch the latest from GitHub in your

Gemfile

gem 'acts_as_favoritor', github: 'jonhue/acts_as_favoritor'

Now run the generator:

$ rails g acts_as_favoritor

To wrap things up, migrate the changes into your database:

$ rails db:migrate

Usage

Setup

Add

acts_as_favoritable

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_favoritable
end

class Book < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_favoritable
end

Specify which models can favorite other models by adding

acts_as_favoritor

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_favoritor
end

acts_as_favoritor

methods

book = Book.find(1)
user = User.find(1)

user favorites book.
user.favorite(book)
user removes book from favorites.
user.unfavorite(book)
Whether user has marked book as his favorite.
user.favorited?(book)
Returns an Active Record relation of user's Favorite records that have not been blocked.
user.all_favorites
Returns an array of all unblocked favorited objects of user. This can be a collection of different object types, e.g.: User, Book.
user.all_favorited
Returns an Active Record relation of Favorite records where the favoritable_type is Book.
user.favorites_by_type('Book')
Returns an Active Record relation of all favorited objects of user where favoritable_type is 'Book'.
user.favorited_by_type('Book')
Returns the exact same as user.favorited_by_type('User').
user.favorited_users
Whether user has been blocked by book.
user.blocked_by?(book)
Returns an array of all favoritables that blocked user.
user.blocked_by

acts_as_favoritable

methods

# Returns all favoritors of a model that `acts_as_favoritable`
book.favoritors

Returns an Active Record relation of records with type User following book.
book.favoritors_by_type('User')
Returns the exact same as book.favoritors_by_type('User').
book.user_favoritors
Whether book has been favorited by user.
book.favorited_by?(user)
Block a favoritor
book.block(user)
Unblock a favoritor
book.unblock(user)
Whether book has blocked user as favoritor.
book.blocked?(user)
Returns an array of all blocked favoritors.
book.blocked

Favorite

model

# Returns an Active Record relation of all `Favorite` records where `blocked` is `false`.
Favorite.unblocked

Returns an Active Record relation of all Favorite records where blocked is true.
Favorite.blocked
Returns an Active Record relation of all favorites of user, including those who were blocked.
Favorite.for_favoritor(user)
Returns an Active Record relation of all favoritors of book, including those who were blocked.
Favorite.for_favoritable(book)

Scopes

Using scopes with

acts_as_favoritor

'favorite'

'watch'

By default all of your favorites are scoped to

'favorite'

You can create new scopes on the fly. Every single method takes

scope

scopes

So lets see how this works:

user.favorite(book, scopes: [:favorite, :watching])
user.unfavorite(book, scope: :watching)
second_user = User.find(2)
user.favorite(second_user, scope: :follow)

That's simple!

When you call a method which returns something while specifying multiple scopes, the method returns the results in a hash with the scopes as keys when scopes are given as an array:

user.favorited?(book, scopes: [:favorite, :watching]) # => { favorite: true, watching: false }
user.favorited?(book, scopes: [:favorite]) # => { favorite: true }
user.favorited?(book, scope: :favorite) # => true

acts_as_favoritor

Favorite

# Returns all `Favorite` records where `scope` is `my_scope`
Favorite.send("#{my_scope}_list")

Examples
Returns all Favorite records where scope is favorites
Favorite.favorite_list
Returns all Favorite records where scope is watching
Favorite.watching_list

Caching

When you set the option

cache

config/initializers/acts_as_favoritor.rb

For that you need to add some database columns:

actsasfavoritor

add_column :users, :favoritor_score, :text
add_column :users, :favoritor_total, :text

actsasfavoritable

add_column :users, :favoritable_score, :text
add_column :users, :favoritable_total, :text
add_column :books, :favoritable_score, :text
add_column :books, :favoritable_total, :text

Caches are stored as hashes with scopes as keys:

user.favoritor_score # => { favorite: 1 }
user.favoritor_total # => { favorite: 1, watching: 1 }
second_user.favoritable_score # => { follow: 1 }
book.favoritable_score # => { favorite: 1 }

Note: Only scopes who have favorites are included.

acts_as_favoritor

user.favoritor_favorite_cache # => 1
second_user.favoritable_follow_cache # => 1
book.favoritable_favorite_cache # => 1

Note: These methods are available for every scope you are using.

The total counts all favorites that were recorded, while the score factors in favorites that were removed. In most use cases the score is the most useful.

Configuration

You can configure actsasfavoritor by passing a block to

configure

config/initializers/acts_as_favoritor.rb

ActsAsFavoritor.configure do |config|
  config.default_scope = :follow
end

default_scope

:favorite

cache

acts_as_favoritor

false

Development

To start development you first have to fork this repository and locally clone your fork.

Install the projects dependencies by running:

$ bundle install

Testing

Tests are written with RSpec and can be found in

/spec

To run tests:

$ bundle exec rspec

To run RuboCop:

$ bundle exec rubocop

Contributing

We warmly welcome everyone who is intersted in contributing. Please reference our contributing guidelines and our Code of Conduct.

Releases

Here you can find details on all past releases. Unreleased breaking changes that are on the current

main

actsasfavoritor follows Semantic Versioning 2.0 as defined at http://semver.org. Reference our security policy.

Publishing

1. Review breaking changes and deprecations in

   CHANGELOG.md

   .
2. Change the gem version in

   lib/acts_as_favoritor/version.rb

   .
3. Reset

   CHANGELOG.md

   .
4. Create a pull request to merge the changes into

   main

   .
5. After the pull request was merged, create a new release listing the breaking changes and commits on

   main

   since the last release.
6. The release workflow will publish the gem to RubyGems.