DestroySoon encapsulates the common pattern of asynchronously removing ActiveRecord models. In complex systems where there is a God entity, the God descruction take a long time to run due to all dependent destruction. In this case it's a good ideia to place the heavy weight job to the background.

DestroySoon uses DelayedJob as queue processing system.

Add DestroySoon to your gemfile:

gem 'destroy_soon', :git => 'git://github.com/redu/destroy-soon.git'

You just need to inject some behaivor to the object you want to destroy asynchronously:

class Course < ActiveRecord::Base
  include DestroySoon::ModelAdditions
end

The ActiveRecord model should have a new column called destroy_soon. This column will be setted to true when a destruction task is scheduled. You should generate a migration as follows:

$ rails g migration AddDestroySoonToCourse

Edit the migration to add the column:

class AddDestroySoonToCourse < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    add_column :courses, :destroy_soon, :boolean, :default => false
    add_index :courses, :destroy_soon
  end

  def self.down
    remove_column :courses, :destroy_soon
  end
end

And migrate the database using rake db:migrate. In order to destroy Course instance in the backgroud call the async_destroy method:

class CoursesController < BaseController
  def destroy
    @course = Course.find(params[:id])
    @course.async_destroy

    respond_with(@course)
  end
end

You can use DelayedJob's named queues setting the queue name as follows:

# config/initializers/destroy_soon.rb
DestroySoon::Queue.default_queue = "destruction"

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