mini-forum-rails

A forum where people can create threads and post in them. Written in Ruby using Rails as a framework. Uses sqlite3.

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Table of Contents

Common Features

These are some features that I would like to go over which do not fit under any of the categories.

Toggling

When a model’s attribute is boolean, it sometimes make sense to have a toggling button to change them. Rather than going through forms, a simple button click is often much more simpler and effective. In mini-forum-rails, muting a post or comment is easy.

# app/controllers/posts_controller.rb
class PostsController < ApplicationController
  # POST /posts/1/mute
  def mute
    @post.mute = !@post.mute
    @post.save(touch: false)
    redirect_to @post, notice: "Notifications about this post was successfully #{@post.mute ? 'muted' : 'unmuted'}."
  end
end

# config/routes.rb
Rails.application.routes.draw do
  post 'posts/:id/mute' => 'posts#mute', :as => :post_mute
  post 'comments/:id/mute' => 'comments#mute', :as => :comment_mute
end

Although this is technically not RESTful, since this is deviating away from the 7 actions (index, new, create, show, edit, update, destroy), this is the most straightforward and easiest to understand solution.

Below is a GIF showing the simplicity.

Toggling Mute

Searching

Users, posts, and posts of specific users can all be searched. A search parameter is given to the controller, and the controller will then pass that to the models. Ultimately, the result of the query is processed by the models, rather than the controllers. This is the most effective solution. The action responsible for this is the index. However, for querying a specific user’s posts, the action responsible is a custom posts action that is essentially an index of the specific user’s posts.

# app/controllers/users_controller.rb
class UsersController < ApplicationController
  # GET /users
  def index
    params[:search] = params[:search].squish unless params[:search].nil?
    @users = User.search(params[:search])
  end

  # GET /users/1/posts
  def posts
    params[:search] = params[:search].squish unless params[:search].nil?
    @user_posts = @user.search_post(params[:search])
  end
end

# app/models/user.rb
class User < ApplicationRecord

  # Returns users with a username or display name matching the search query, depending if '@' was included in the front or not
  def self.search(search)
    if search.blank?
      User.all
    elsif search.first == '@'
      User.where("username LIKE ?", "%#{search[1..-1]}%")
    else
      User.where("display_name LIKE ?", "%#{search}%")
    end
  end

  # Returns posts by this user with a title matching the search query
  def search_post(search)
    if search.blank?
      self.posts
    else
      self.posts.where("title LIKE ?", "%#{search}%")
    end
  end
end

Notice how the search query is sanitized using squish in the controller. Also notice how the search query can change depending on whether or not a special character was included (In this case, the @ character). The search can be matched to a user’s username or display name depending on input.

Below is a GIF showcasing the above functionalities.

Searching Users

Input Sanitation

Most user inputs are sanitized using a common helper method. There are things that need to be considered when sanitizing user inputs. Password fields should never be sanitized, and content fields should try to not remove new lines as that is not the default behavior and mini-forum-rails allows new lines for content fields.

# app/helpers/application_helper.rb
module ApplicationHelper

  # Sanitizes parameters according to various rules
  def sanitize(params)
    params.each_key do |k|
      if k == 'content'
        # Squish each individual lines instead
        content_array = params[k].split("\n")
        for i in 0...content_array.length
          content_array[i] = content_array[i].squish
        end
        # Rejoin the lines into one
        params[k] = content_array.reject(&:blank?).join("\n")
      elsif k == 'password' || k == 'password_confirmation' || k == 'current_password'
        # Do not sanitize password fields
        next
      else
        # Squish it
        params[k] = params[k].squish
      end
    end
    params
  end

end

# app/controllers/posts_controller.rb
class PostsController < ApplicationController
  private
    # Only allow a list of trusted parameters through.
    def post_params
      sanitize params.require(:post).permit(:title, :content, :notify_users)
    end
end

Sanitation cleans inputs so that oddly placed whitespaces are removed. This is also important for the User Experience as it ensures that all content by other users look clean. Another thing to note is that the parameters are directly modified. This means that should a form be rejected, when Rails highlights the erroneous fields, the fields are already sanitized.

Below is a GIF showcasing the above functionalities.

Sanitation