Save external Tweets in database in Rails - ruby-on-rails

Question

I am new to rails developement and to the MVC architecture. I have a little application where I can add Videos' URLs from Dailymotion or Youtube and get the tweets related to that URL using the twitter gem in Ruby on Rails.
Now i'm able to store the tweets like this : (This is the video controller)
def show
#video = Video.find(params[:id])
# Creating a URL variable
url = #video.url
# Search tweets for the given video/url
#search = get_client.search("#{#video.url} -rt")
# Save tweets in database
#search.collect do |t|
tweet = Tweet.create do |u|
u.from_user = t.user.screen_name.to_s
u.from_user_id_str = t.id.to_s
u.profile_image_url = t.user.profile_image_url.to_s
u.text = t.text.to_s
u.twitter_created_at = t.created_at.to_s
end
end
I'm not sure if this is the right way to do it (doing it in the controller ?), and what I want to do now is to specify that those tweets that have just been stored belong to the current video. Also I would like to have some sort of validation that makes the controller look in the database before doing this to only save the new tweets. Can someone help me with that ?
My models :
class Video < ActiveRecord::Base
attr_accessible :url
has_many :tweets
end
class Tweet < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :video
end
My routes.rb
resources :videos do
resources :tweets
end

Answer 1

This is an example of a "fat controller", an antipattern in any MVC architecture (here's a good read on the topic).
Have you considered introducing a few new objects to encapsulate this behavior? For example, I might do something like this:
# app/models/twitter_search.rb
class TwitterSearch
def initialize(url)
#url = url
end
def results
get_client.search("#{#url} -rt")
end
end
# app/models/twitter_persistence.rb
class TwitterPersistence
def self.persist(results)
results.map do |result|
self.new(result).persist
end
end
def initialize(result)
#result = result
end
def persist
Tweet.find_or_create_by(remote_id: id) do |tweet|
tweet.from_user = screen_name
tweet.from_user_id_str = from_user_id
tweet.profile_image_url = profile_image_url
tweet.text = text
tweet.twitter_created_at = created_at
end
end
private
attr_reader :result
delegate :screen_name, :profile_image_url, to: :user
delegate :id, :user, :from_user_id, :text, :created_at, to: :result
end
Notice the use of find_or_create_by ... Twitter results should have a unique identifier that you can use to guarantee that you don't create duplicates. This means you'll need a remote_id or something on your tweets table, and of course I just guessed at the attribute name (id) that the service you're using will return.
Then, in your controller:
# app/controllers/videos_controller.rb
class VideosController < ApplicationController
def show
#tweets = TwitterPersistence.persist(search.results)
end
private
def search
#search ||= TwitterSearch.new(video.url)
end
def video
#video ||= Video.find(params[:id])
end
end
Also note that I've removed calls to to_s ... ActiveRecord should automatically convert attributes to the correct types before saving them to the database.
Hope this helps!