HasFriendship

Add social network friendship feature to your Active Record models.

HasFriendship allows objects in a model to send, accept, and decline friend requests using self-refernetial polymorphic association.

Getting started

Add HasFriendship to your Gemfile:

gem 'has_friendship'

After you install HasFriendship, you need to run the generator:

$ rails generate has_friendship

The generator will copy a migration that creates friendships table. Run the migration to finish the setup.

$ rake db:migrate

Usage

Simply drop in has_friendship to a model:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_friendship
end

Friend request

Now, User instances can send, accept, and decline friend requests:

@mac = User.create(name: "Mac")
@dee = User.create(name: "Dee")

# @mac sends a friend request to @dee
@mac.friend_request(@dee)

# @dee can accept the friend request
@dee.accept_request(@mac)

# @dee can also decline the friend request
@dee.decline_request(@mac)

A Friendship can also be removed:

# @dee removes @mac from its friends
@dee.remove_friend(@mac)

Type of friends

There are three types of friends. They can be accessed using association:

• requested_friends

Instances that sent friend request that has not been accepted yet.

@mac.friend_request(@dee)

@dee.requested_friends # => [@mac]

• pending_friends

Instances that received but has not accepted the friend request yet.

@mac.friend_request(@dee)

@mac.pending_friends # => [@dee]

• friends

Instances with accepted Friendship.

@mac.friend_request(@dee)
@dee.accpet_request(@mac)

@mac.friends # => [@dee]
@dee.friends # => [@mac]

Contributing

Issues and pull reqeusts are welcomed.