Has Many Friends

has_many_friends is a plugin based off of the friendship_plugin that can be found here (http://svn.webwideconsulting.com/svn/friendship_plugin/). 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 &lt; 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

Returns true if user is friends with friend. user.is_friends_with? friend user.is_pending_friends_with? friend user.id_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