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HasManyFriends – Steve Ehrenberg – http://dnite.org
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has_many_friends is a plugin based off of the friendship_plugin that can be found
here (http://svn.webwideconsulting.com/svn/friendship_plugin/). This version of the
plugin adds some features I wanted as well as eliminates the need for 2 friendship
rows created in the table. The goal is to make it relatively seamless for anyone to
create a fully functional friends system for their application.

Side Note :: I developed has_many_friends on edge rails before 2.0 was released
and haven’t done any work on it since. Most of this plugin should work but if it doesn’t,
feel free to fork and submit some changes.. If I get some extra time I’ll try and test and
fix it up for Rails 3.×..

Setup
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To use this plugin, you will first need to install it. This can be done quite simply
with the following command.

script/plugin install git://github.com/swemoney/has_many_friends.git

We’ll need to generate the model and migration for your friendship table.

script/generate hmf_friendship_model Friendship rake db:migrate

If you will be running tests, you may need to prepare your test database again.

rake db:test:prepare

You should be just about set! All you need to do is add the following method
to your User model.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base has_many_friends

1. the rest of your user model …
2. …
   end

Usage
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After the plugin is installed. All of these super cool methods will be attached to
any user.

These methods are the actual associations. They return what you’d expect.
user.friends_for_me
user.friends_by_me
user.pending_friends_for_me
user.pending_friends_by_me

Again, these will return what you would expect them to return.
user.friends
user.pending_friends
user.pending_or_accepted_friends

1. The following 3 methods were changed as of revision 8. They have been listed here
2. as these methods, but for some reason, i never changed their names in the actual
3. plugin file. If your using a pre-8 version and things broke for you, use the new
4. method names in your application. Sorry for the inconvenience.
   Returns true if user is friends with friend.
   user.is_friends_with? friend
   user.is_pending_friends_with? friend
   user.is_friends_or_pending_with? friend

Creates, deletes or updates friendship requests.
user.request_friendship_with friend
user.delete_friendship_with friend
user.accept_friendship_with friend

Bypass the request and just make a friend.
user.become_friends_with! friend

Returns the friendship object (good for looking up extra attributes about
the friendship, like when it was accepted and such.
user.friendship friend

Copyright © 2008 Steve Ehrenberg, released under the MIT license