SimpleActivity

SimpleActivity is a gem to record, display and reuse users activities for Rails app, in a fast, flexible and extendable way.

Demo site and source

• Fast - SimpleActivity is built with speed in mind. Normally activities involve several models and hard to eager load. SimpleActivity allows you define cache rules beforehand so there is no JOIN on displaying activities.

• Flexible - Raw data is here, you are free to do anything you like, display them in any fashion.

• Extendable - Actually activity records are useful not only for displaying as timeline. There could be lots of other functionality based on activity such as assining reputation to models, assign points to users, send notifications, granting badges etc. It would be redudant if every feature build its own logic to record activity which is basically the same.

  To solve this problem, this gem provides a hook for other libs or your app code to work on the raw data once activity created, either within the request or at backend(recommended). This will remove code repetition and increase app performance.

• Record key data of user activities(create, update, destroy and custom) in controler level, automaticly or manually.
• Read and process cache rules to allow showing activities with minimal db load.
• Provide helper to load partials with defined names
• Provide barebone model to allow your customization if needed.
• Provide hook to further working on the activity created.

• Add the gem to Gemfile and bundle

    gem 'simple_activity'

• Install the custom files and migration

    $ rails generate simple_activity:install
    $ rake db:migrate

By default you don't need to do anything to get activities recorded.

Activity record will be created automaticly at basic RESTful actions :create, :update and :destroy, with filtering out some controllers such as "registration", "session", "admin" etc. You can also customize them. See more at Configurations.

The rules file rules.yml resides in app/models/activity/rules.yml. One purpose of rule.yml is to helper displaying - customizing displaying logic and define things to cache.

Here is an example of rules.yml

Comment:
  _cache:
    actor:
      - nick_name
    target:
      - commentable_title
      - excerpt
Article:
  ...

The usage of global activities is to show all activities happened in the application. The example is the sidebar widget of the demo.

The model method is Activity.all or any scope you like. The model Activity is added to application so you can add any custom methods you like.

A helper render_activity(activity) is shipped. This helper will render partial at default place according to the activity.

At first you need to write partials at right place. By default the helper will look up app/views/activities folder. The partial name need to be a combination of model name and action key with underscore before. e.g. _comment_create.html.erb, _article_destroy.html.slim

You can call any attributes defined in cache rules within the partial, by concating actor/target and the method name. e.g. activity.actore_name, activity.target_title, activity.target_commentable_title

actor_id and target_id is available natively. No need cache rules.

Also actor and target object is available if you really need them. But it's not recommended to use them to reduce db load. activity.actor.name is less preferred to activity.actore_name which is a cached value.

As said above, to define a link, you don't need the instance itself. Instead, id will work as well. So, instead of link_to activity.actor, it's recommended to use link_to user_path(activity.actor_id)

User specific activities works like a timeline.

To allow displaying user specific activities, add the following line to User model:

acts_as_activity_actor

Then you can use @user.activities method to show activities whose actor is this user.

The default actions to record activiies are :create, :update and :destroy. Customize them as per your need.

config.filtered_controllers = /(user|admin|session|registration)/i

You don't need activity to be recorded in every controller. Below is the default settings. You can customize them as you like.

config.filtered_controllers = /(user|admin|session|registration)/i

Reuse activity in third party libs.

Docs and demo coming soon.

SimpleActivity is built to work under both Rails 3 and Rails 4. The demo is on Rails 4. The current tests are based on Rails 3, and Rails 4 ones will come later.

The current ORM is ActiveRecord. Other ORMS should be able to added in the future without too much sweat(or coffee?)

This gem is still at its early stage. Very likely there are bugs and unconsidered situations. Thansk for your patience and trust to use it. Your bug reporting and pull requests will be appreciated.

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

MIT. See MIT-LICENSE