I am happy to announce that I have released the acts_as_commentable plugin, my first Ruby on Rails plugin. The Acts As Commentable plugin allows for comments to be added to your Rails ActiveRecord classes.<\/p>\n
To install the Acts As Commentable plugin run the following command:<\/p>\n
script\/plugin install http:\/\/juixe.com\/svn\/acts_as_commentable<\/pre>\nThe installation process will add several ruby scripts in the vendor\/plugins directory. Create a new rails migration and cut and past the following self.up and self.down methods:<\/p>\n
\r\ndef self.up\r\n create_table :comments, :force => true do |t|\r\n t.column :title, :string, :limit => 50, :default => ""\r\n t.column :comment, :string, :default => ""\r\n t.column :created_at, :datetime, :null => false\r\n t.column :commentable_id, :integer, :default => 0, :null => false\r\n t.column :commentable_type, :string, :limit => 15,\r\n :default => "", :null => false\r\n t.column :user_id, :integer, :default => 0, :null => false\r\n end\r\n\r\n add_index :comments, ["user_id"], :name => "fk_comments_user"\r\nend\r\n\r\ndef self.down\r\n drop_table :comments\r\nend\r\n<\/pre>\nOnce you have installed the plugin you can start using it in your ActiveRecord class simply by calling the acts_as_commentable method.<\/p>\n
\r\nclass Post < ActiveRecord::Base\r\n acts_as_commentable\r\nend\r\n<\/pre>\nTo add a comment to a post object you can do the following:<\/p>\n
\r\ncomment = Comment.new(:title => titleStr, :comment => commentStr)\r\nlogger << "COMMENT #{comment.comment}\\n"\r\npost.comments << comment\r\n<\/pre>\nOr you could have use the add_comment method on post.<\/p>\n
\r\npost.add_comment comment\r\n<\/pre>\nYou can also use the post’s comments property to read all comments for the given post. Once a comment has been added to a post you can always reference the post object using the comment’s commentable property.<\/p>\n
\r\ncomment.commentable # references the post\r\n<\/pre>\nOne note, the default implementation of Acts As Commentable requires you to use a user model to link all comments to a user. This requirement can easily be removed or enhanced in the Comment class. But if you have a user model you can retrieve all comments for a user by executing the following statement:<\/p>\n
\r\ncomments = Comment.find_comments_by_user(userInstance)\r\n<\/pre>\nIf you want to retrieve only the comments for a user for a particular model you can do something like:<\/p>\n
\r\npostComments = Post.find_comments_by_user(userInstance)\r\n<\/pre>\n