Acts As Commentable Plugin
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.
To install the Acts As Commentable plugin run the following command:
script/plugin install http://juixe.com/svn/acts_as_commentable
The 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:
def self.up
create_table :comments, :force => true do |t|
t.column :title, :string, :limit => 50, :default => ""
t.column :comment, :string, :default => ""
t.column :created_at, :datetime, :null => false
t.column :commentable_id, :integer, :default => 0, :null => false
t.column :commentable_type, :string, :limit => 15,
:default => "", :null => false
t.column :user_id, :integer, :default => 0, :null => false
end
add_index :comments, ["user_id"], :name => "fk_comments_user"
end
def self.down
drop_table :comments
end
Once you have installed the plugin you can start using it in your ActiveRecord class simply by calling the acts_as_commentable method.
class Post < ActiveRecord::Base acts_as_commentable end
To add a comment to a post object you can do the following:
comment = Comment.new(:title => titleStr, :comment => commentStr)
logger << "COMMENT #{comment.comment}n"
post.comments << comment
Or you could have use the add_comment method on post.
post.add_comment comment
You 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.
comment.commentable # references the post
One 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:
comments = Comment.find_comments_by_user(userInstance)
If you want to retrieve only the comments for a user for a particular model you can do something like:
postComments = Post.find_comments_by_user(userInstance)
If you have any comments, questions, and/or suggestions please don’t hesitate to drop me a line.
Technorati Tags: ruby, rails, ruby on rails, plugin, rails plugin, acts_as_commentable
Just thought you might want to know: we’re using this on likebetter.com for photo commenting. thanks!
I think something happened to this plugin with the newest version of rails. Basically, every time I reload the comment model it’s not picking up the belongs_to relationship. So:
belongs_to :user
Causes an ActiveRecord::AssociationTypeMismatch error. Says:
User expected, got User
That doesn’t make much sense. I know it’s probably a rails issue, but I thought you might have some insight. There are some other loading issues that are a bit too complex to explain in this little form.
@Bryan
Did I see you give a presentation on likebetter at the January SV RoR meeting here in the Yay Area!? I was there! Thats a great application you have there…
@famoseagle
I think the issue that you are dealing with is that you don’t have a user model. The plugin comes with a comment model and this requires a user. If you don’t have users just feel free to comment the belongs_to :user line in the comment.rb file.
I did test this with Rails 1.2.2 on two separate machines and ‘it is working on my machine…’ :)
How can I do counter caching with acts_as_commentable? Not sure how that works with polymorphic relationships. Currently I am summarizing comment counts quite often which is leading to a lot of extra db queries. Thanks!
Just wanted to let you know that I was getting feedback from my users that comment text was being cutting off. I changed the comment field to be type text and the issue is fixed. Otherwise, a great plugin. Thanks!
@carlivar - You can have a summary table for you model which might have a count of the comment for that model. The summary table is not part of the plugin, so at this time you would need to manage that…
@bmctigue - The migration in the README used to have comment as a string type this has been modified to describe the comment as a text for a while now. Sorry for any inconvenience that might have caused.
Thank you. Small feature request? It would be nice to be able to turn built-in rails counter caching on? Something like:
acts_as_commentable, :counter_cache => true
Hi
Many thanks for this neat plugin. I needed comments on comments [multi level].
I changed Comment itself to be acts_as_commentable and it works just fine. Do you see any problems with this approach?
anand
I do get => undefined method ‘find_commentable’ for Comment:Class following this example from Comments on Acts as Commentable found via SWik.
In my model.rb I do have added acts_as_commentable, also the values commentable / commentable_id are set and post correctly reflecting the model in question…
Never mind, in my enthusiasm I added an CommentModel to my app before reading further yesterday night and then forgot about it at all..so it was overwriting the plugins modelClass..it works as promised ;)
Thx and regards
Ok, now I do have an issue.
Where do you get the property “comments” from for a given model ??
reading on this page and the forumentry I posted above I understand I would get all comments belonging to an ég. item just by doing:
@comments = @item.comments
This method isnt veen executed looking at the logfile, nor I dont see any method in your plugin called “comments” so I just wonder where it should come from
on the other side, I also dont get a “method not found “exception” what makes me wonder also
@famoseagle: I was thrown back by the same bug as you today and I think I found the problem: Since plugin code doesn’t get reloaded on every request, the comment model saves the object type of the user model at “load time”, but the user model gets reloaded at every request (at least in development mode) and so the user model gets a new object_id every time and this is not reflected in the comments model association.
The error message is funny, but User and User are really two different things, then. One solution is to move comment.rb to app/models/, since then it will be reloaded, too and all is synchronized.
A more complete description can be found at
http://localhost3000.de/2007/04/17/acts_as_commentable-reload-fubar/
Hope it helps.
Jan,
Thank you very much. That is exactly what I did … Stripped out all the extra garbage and moved it into my app. Very interesting issue though… I will have to keep that one in my back pocket. Thanks for the heads up.
Casey
After upgrading to rails 1.2.3 I am occasionally getting the following error when accessing the comments for a model that acts_as_commentable.
undefined method `table_name’ for REXML::Comment:Class
It appears that the wrong Comment class is being referenced. Has anybody else seen this? Does anybody know how to fix it?
Thanks,
Mark
My dirty little hack to use counter_cache while you guys don’t come up with a new release:
http://www.hervalfreire.com/blog/2007/05/13/caching-comments-with-acts_as_commentable/
I sexy’d up that migration for Rails 2.0 or the Sexy_Migration plugin:
def self.up create_table :comments, :force => true do string :title, :limit => 50, :default => "" string :comment, :default => "" timestamps! polymorphic :commentable foreign_key :user end add_index :comments, ["user_id"], :name => "fk_comments_user" end def self.down drop_table :comments end[…] primero es Acts as Commentable que, cómo indica su nombre, permite marcar los modelos Rails como comentables. No hay nada más […]
Hey I love the plugin. Was just wondering if you or I could make a generator for the migrations and stick them inside the repo. I think it will make the installation just that much easier :)
Great plugin thanks
[new to rails] and being stupid, but how do i get the name of the user who added the comment, i have a partial that displays the comment and thought i would enter somthing like but this dont work.
I am using acts_as_authenticated, can anyone help me?
Andrew -
You should be able to make use of the model associations (ie, has_many: , belongs_to:, etc) to pull in the name of the user from another table. An example:
” class=”comment_bar”>
” class=”comment_header”> ()
” class=”comment_body”>
Hmm. The cut and paste didn’t translate well.
Lets say that I have a photo model using acts_as_commentable, which is associated to the user model with belongs_to: / has_many:
I would do something to this effect in the view:
for p in @photo.comments
… p.user.realname
… p.user.email
(etc)
[…] certainly benefited from plugins in our Rails development, using some really useful plugins like acts_as_commentable, attachment_fu and […]
[…] acts_as_commentable plugin […]
Very good plugin, because it’s easy to install and use, and also easy to change since it’s so small.
Note: The sexy migration (Rails 2.0 style) posted here does not work and needs some changes first.
Nice plugin, I plan on using it for a project I’m working on. One thing you could add with little effort is a fixture. acts_as_taggable_on_steroids has a good example- it’d be like 1 line in your test file and yaml file with some default data.
either way, nice job, keep up the good work.
Awesome plugin! If you’d like to map the comments table to a non-standard user foreign key but aren’t sure where to start, I wrote up a short blog post about it: Using acts_as_commentable with a non-standard user foreign key
Hope this helps somebody!
Hey guys,
Is there any way to integrate attachment_fu plugin with in Acts As Commentable Plugin? i want to add more than 1 image for a comment. how can i do it?
thanks in advance
Vipin
This is the migration I used for Rails 2.0 (mostly sexy migrations)
def self.up
create_table :comments, :force => true do |t|
t.string :title, :default => ""
t.text :comment, :default => ""
t.timestamps
t.integer :user_id, :default => 0, :null => false
t.string :web_site
t.string :email
t.string :name
t.references :commentable, :polymorphic => true
end
add_index :comments, ["user_id"], :name => "fk_comments_user"
end
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Is there a way to incorporate this with paperclip?
I added has_attached_file to the comment.rb and followed directions but its not saving the file. It keeps coming up blank.
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