Rails: Commenting for a Post - ruby-on-rails

Question

I am creating a website blog and don't know what I'm going to do for adding a comment in a blog. Is there a gem or trick for that? Can you please help me and give me some tips?

Answer 1

There is no "trick" - you just have to code it up like the rest of your application.
Associations
Since your comments will be directly associated to your posts, it makes to start by looking at the association between the two models:
#app/models/comment.rb
Class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :post
end
#app/models/post.rb
Class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :comments
end
The importance of this association is that if you want to create comments, although they'll be their own individual objects, they'll have to be "tied" to a post. The importance of this lies in the object-orientated nature of Ruby / Rails:
--
OOP
Most people don't realize that since Ruby is an object orientated language, Rails is also an object-orientated framework.
This means that you need to structure you methods, actions, etc around objects. Most beginners think you just have to create a "logical" app flow - whereas the reality is you need to build your app around the objects you hope to serve
--
Resources
Further to this, you then need to consider how you'll interact with the resources / objects in your application. I would recommend using nested resources to do this:
#config/routes.rb
resources :posts do
resources :comments #-> domain.com/posts/5/comments/new
end
The reason this is important is because of how you can then create a comment with it:
#app/controllers/comments_controller.rb
Class CommentsController < ApplicationController
def new
#post = Post.find params[:post_id]
#comment = Comment.new
end
def create
#post = Post.find params[:post_id]
#comment = Comment.new(comment_params)
end
private
def comment_params
params.require(:comment).permit(:comment, :params, :post_id)
end
end
This allows you to use the following:
#app/views/comments/new.html.erb
<%= form_for [#post, #comment] do |f| %>
<%= f.text_field :comment_attributes %>
<%= f.submit %>
<% end %>
This will help you create comment objects as a child of the post objects you want - giving you the ability to create comments for each post.
Bonus
A bonus here is that if you wanted to then nest the comments on your site, you'll want to use the Ancestry gem, as follows:
The way to do this is relatively simple. If you have a comments creation system set up, as outlined above, you'll want to add the ancestry gem to your Comment model:
#app/models/comments.rb
Class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
has_ancestry
end
You'll need to migrate an ancestry column to your comments datatable, and then be able to populate the ancestry attribute:
You can then use the following partial to show the comments in a tree fashion:
#app/views/comments/_tree.html.erb
<ol class="categories">
<% collection.arrange.each do |category, sub_item| %>
<li>
<div class="category">
<%= link_to category.title, edit_admin_category_path(category) %>
</div>
<!-- Children -->
<% if category.has_children? %>
<%= render partial: "category", locals: { collection: category.children } %>
<% end %>
</li>
<% end %>
</ol>
You can then call it as follows:
<%= render partial: "comments/tree", locals: { collecton: #comments } %>

Answer 2

You could implement external comments engine, such as Disqus, or keeping it in house by making a Comment resource, which would have a relation to your post, like
class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :comments
end
class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :post
end
This way you have a right way of treating your comments.
It needs some other work, controllers, views etc... But the spirit is there.