Railsify!

has_many_friends

HasManyFriends – Steve Ehrenberg – http://blog.dnite.org
===========
has_many_friends is a plugin based off of the friendship_plugin that can be found here (http://svn.webwideconsulting.com/svn/friendship_plugin/) but apears to have moved. If anyone knows where this plugin can be found, I’d love to link to it from this README. This version of the plugin adds some features I wanted as well as eliminates the need for 2 friendship rows created in the table. The goal is to make it relatively seamless for anyone to create a fully functional friends system for their application.

Setup
====
To use this plugin, you will first need to install it. This can be done quite simply
with the following command.

   script/plugin install http://svn.dnite.org/has_many_friends

We’ll need to generate the model and migration for your friendship table.

   script/generate hmf_friendship_model Friendship
   rake db:migrate



If you will be running tests, you may need to prepare your test database again.

   rake db:test:prepare

You should be just about set! All you need to do is add the following method
to your User model.

   class User < ActiveRecord::Base
     has_many_friends
     # the rest of your user model ...
     # ...
   end

Usage
===
After the plugin is installed. All of these super cool methods will be attached to any user.

These methods are the actual associations. They return what you’d expect.

  • user.friends_for_me
  • user.friends_by_me
  • user.pending_friends_for_me
  • user.pending_friends_by_me

Again, these will return what you would expect them to return.

  • user.friends
  • user.pending_friends
  • user.pending_or_accepted_friends

The following 3 methods were changed as of revision 8. They have been listed here as these methods, but for some reason, i never changed their names in the actual plugin file. If your using a pre-8 version and things broke for you, use the new method names in your application. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Returns true if user is friends with friend.

  • user.is_friends_with? friend
  • user.is_pending_friends_with? friend
  • user.is_friends_or_pending_with? friend

Creates, deletes or updates friendship requests.

  • user.request_friendship_with friend
  • user.delete_friendship_with friend
  • user.accept_friendship_with friend

Bypass the request and just make a friend.

  • user.become_friends_with! friend

Returns the friendship object (good for looking up extra attributes about the friendship, like when it was accepted and such.

  • user.friendship friend

Copyright © 2007 Steve Ehrenberg, released under the MIT license