Parole adds the ability to comment on ActiveRecord records.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'parole'

Then run the task to generate the migration:

$ rails generate parole:install

You should now be able to mark models as commentable:

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_commentable
end

You’re pretty much done after that. You’re now able to do this:

user = User.find(1)
article = Article.find(1)

article.comments.create(commenter: user, comment: 'Hello world!')
article.comments.count # => 1

You can also provide roles for comments, so you can have multiple type of comments per record.

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_commentable roles: [:photos, :videos]
end

user = User.find(1)
article = Article.find(1)

article.photos_comments.create(commenter: user, comment: 'Hello world!')
article.photos_comments.count # => 1
article.comments.count # => 1

Whenever a comment is created or destroyed, Parole looks into the commentable record and the commenter record and check if there’s a <role>_comments_count column and/or a comments_count column. If so, it updates them so they reflect the total number of comments and the number of comments of this role for the record.

Note: The commenter model must implements a has_many relationship that fetch its comments.

So let’s say the Article model has the following columns: photos_comments_count, videos_comments_count and comments_count, and the User model has the following column: comments_count.

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_commentable roles: [:photos, :videos]
end
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :comments, -> { where(commenter_type: 'User') }, foreign_key: :commenter_id
end

user = User.find(1)
article = Article.find(1)

article.photos_comments.create(commenter: user, comment: 'Hello world!')
article.photos_comments_count # => 1
article.videos_comments_count # => 0
article.comments_count # => 1
user.comments_count # => 1

article.videos_comments.create(commenter: user, comment: 'Hello world again!')
article.photos_comments_count # => 1
article.videos_comments_count # => 1
article.comments_count # => 2
user.comments_count # => 2

Parole is © 2013-2015 Mirego and may be freely distributed under the New BSD license. See the LICENSE.md file.

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