"Like" mechanism.

My DropThot project will primarily be driven by a "like" system. Thots will be ordered by likes and by time-span, and comments on thots will also be ranked by likes. I know there are gems out there that implements this (e.g. act_as_votable), but for learning purposes I'm coding everything by hand.

I thought implementing likes would be very straight forward, but it's a little bit more complicated than I thought. In my case, I'm using a polymorphic association for my Like model because I need to implement likes for both thots and comments. I'm sure there are other ways to do it, such as a Likable class/model that the Thot and Comment models inherits from, but I think this is my preferred way of doing it.

Here's how my Like spec looks like so far:

describe Like do
  let(:user)  { FactoryGirl.create(:user) }
  let(:other) { FactoryGirl.create(:user) }
  let(:thot)  { other.thots.build(content: "This is an interesting thot.") }

  before { @like = user.likes.build(likable: thot) }

  subject { @like }

  it { should be_valid }
  it { should respond_to :likable }
  it { should respond_to :likable_type }
  it { should respond_to :user }
  it { should respond_to :user_id }

  its(:user)    { should == user }
  its(:likable) { should == thot }

  describe "liking your own thot" do
    before do
      own_thot = user.thots.build(content: "This is my own thot.")
      @like = user.likes.build(likable: own_thot)
    end

    it { should_not be_valid }
  end
end

I initially ran into a problem with FactoryGirl with creating multiple users (since users cannot have same username or email). A quick google helped solve this.

Instead of:

factory :user do
  name "Alex"
  email "alex@ucla.edu"
  password "uclabruins"
  password_confirmation "uclabruins"
end

Do:

factory :user do
  sequence(:name)  { |n| "Alex#{n}" }
  sequence(:email) { |n| "alex#{n}@ucla.edu" }
  password "uclabruins"
  password_confirmation "uclabruins"
end

The sequence method in factories.rb makes it so that you can continue creating new users via FactoryGirl without running into validation problems.

This was just a quick blog post to help me outline my thinking process and to jog my brain for next steps; which will be to finish the like mechanism and the proper buttons. After that's done, it should open the doors to the rest of my app's functionality.