The Bacon Bear Blog: Acts As Flaggable released

Acts As Flaggable released

Jeff — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 01:32:00 -0800

Here’s my first stab at a rails plugin, small as it may be.

Acts As Flaggable is a model modifier which allows flags to be associated with records. Authors of community driven sites may find this useful for quickly adding the ability to mark records as “spam” or “inappropriate”. There’s also facilities in place to automatically take a specific action automatically if a record has been flagged a certain way too many times (Think auto-removing posts that have been marked as “spam”).

To install:

script/plugin install http://svn.baconbear.com/rails_plugins/acts_as_flaggable/trunk

To prepare your database, create a migration with the following:

def self.up
   create_table :flags, :force => true do |t|
     t.column :flag, :string, :default => ""
     t.column :comment, :string, :default => ""
     t.column :created_at, :datetime, :null => false
     t.column :flaggable_id, :integer, :default => 0, :null => false
     t.column :flaggable_type, :string, :limit => 15,
       :default => "", :null => false
     t.column :user_id, :integer, :default => 0, :null => false
   end

   add_index :flags, ["user_id"], :name => "fk_flags_user"
 end

 def self.down
   drop_table :flags
 end

To prepare your model:

class Model < ActiveRecord::Base
    acts_as_flaggable

        protected
        # Flagged method is called after every add_flag.  This callback method
        # is totally optional and does not have to be included in the model
        def flagged(flag, flag_count)
            # Add code here to take action when flag reaches a certain flag_count
        end
 end

To use:

p = Post.find(someid)
p.add_flag Flag.new(:flag => :spam, :comment => 'some comment')

If you notice I used add_flag instead of the typical << operator allowed by rails. Currently it’s a requirement that you use add_flag if you need the flagged callback to be called. I’ll probably fix this in a future checkin.

Avid plugin users will recognize a lot of the code and README from the Acts As Commentable plugin. Thanks to the clear and readable manner Acts As Commentable was written in, it was a fairly easy change to morph the commentable plugin into the flaggable plugin I have here. So, special thanks to Juixe for releasing a well written plugin!

"Acts As Flaggable released" by Tom

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:19:05 -0700

As Soph already mentioned, there is a spelling error in flag.rb. This will cause errors (and they sure are ugly when unit testing). To fix: change: validates_prescence_of :flag to validates_presence_of :flag

"Acts As Flaggable released" by Tom

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:18:58 -0700

"Acts As Flaggable released" by Karen

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 13:17:55 -0700

If you want the :flag to come from a form field, the method to_sym is useful! In my case, I'm using a select box to populate flag reasons. Here's an example of the controller converting the selected value to a symbol:

Flag.new(:flag => params[:reason].to_sym, :comments => params[:comment])

"Acts As Flaggable released" by Dallas Slieker

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 14:10:09 -0700

I agree with Chris Blackburn. Certainly an annoyance.

"Acts As Flaggable released" by Chris Blackburn

Fri, 25 May 2007 14:15:04 -0700

Jeff, it would be helpful if you setup your repository so people don't have to rename the folder from 'trunk' to 'acts_as_flaggable' after they install it. It is just a peeve of mine but annoying nonetheless.

"Acts As Flaggable released" by Soph

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 10:49:04 -0800

I just installed the plugin and it looks like, that there is a spelling error. In "lib/flag.rb" The 9th Line is: "validates_prescence_of :flag" it is not prescence it should spelled presence "validates_presence_of :flag"

"Acts As Flaggable released" by Jeff

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 16:44:03 -0800

I think I like that! I'll add it in when I get the chance.

"Acts As Flaggable released" by bitbutter

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 04:26:00 -0800

Sounds useful, thanks!

Would it be possible to make the addflag method responsible for creating the new flag object, rather than the user having to to it ‘manually’ when calling addflag? So “p.add_flag Flag.new(:flag => :spam, :comment => ‘some comment’)” would become; “p.add_flag :flag => :spam, :comment => ‘some comment’”

this seems neater to me.