RailsRestVote

Rails Rest Vote is a Ruby Gem which adds voting feature to any model of your rails application and exposes its RESTful APIs.

If you are using any frontend client like angular2 in your web app and also for mobile apps, it is really helpful.

Prerequisites

Enabling CORS

If you’re building a public API you’ll probably want to enable Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), in order to make cross-origin AJAX requests possible.

This is made very simple by the rack-cors gem. Just stick it in your Gemfile like so:

gem 'rack-cors'

And put something like the code below in config/application.rb of your Rails application. For example, this will allow GET, POST or OPTIONS requests from any origin on any resource.

module YourApp
  class Application < Rails::Application

    # ...

    config.middleware.insert_before 0, "Rack::Cors" do
      allow do
        origins '*'
        resource '*', :headers => :any, :methods => [:get, :post, :options]
      end
    end

  end
end

For more detailed configuration options please see the gem documentation

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'rails_rest_vote'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Run the following command in your project folder:

$ rails g rails_rest_vote MODEL

In the above command you will need to replace MODEL with the class name used for the application’s users (it’s frequently User but could also be Admin)

It will do 3 things for you:

• Create a migration file of Vote table in db/migrate/ folder.
• Insert association in user model i.e has_many :votes
• Create vote model i.e app/models/vote.rb

After that migrate database by using.

$ rake db:migrate

Now you are good to go.

Usage

Add below line to the model for which you want to record upvote/downvote or like/unlike functionality:

has_many :votes, :as => :votable

It can be used in 2 ways, I am using Post model in below examples:

1. Use as upvote/downvote ( stackoverflow):

   APIs

   /api/votes/up

   API is used for upvote on model.

   method: POST
   body: {"votable_id":"1","votable_type":"Post","user_id":"1"}
   content-type: application/json
   response: {"status":200,"message":"upvoted successfully."}
   

   /api/votes/down

   API is used for downvote on model.

   method: POST
   body: {"votable_id":"1","votable_type":"Post","user_id":"1"}
   content-type: application/json
   response: {"status":200,"message":"downvoted successfully."}
   

   /api/votes/user?user_id=1

   API returns upvote and downvote count done by a particular user.

   method: GET
   content-type: application/json
   response: {"status":200,"upcount":1,"upvotes":[{"id":1,...}], "downcount":1,"downvotes":[{"id":3,...}]}
   

   /api/votes/model?votable_id=1&votable_type=Post

   API returns upvote and downvote count done on a particular model.

   method: GET
   content-type: application/json
   response: {"status":200,"upcount":1,"upvotes":[{"id":1,...}], "downcount":1,"downvotes":[{"id":3,...}]}
   

2. Use as like/unlike ( facebook):

   APIs

   /api/likes

   Same API is used for like and unlike functionality.For the first time if you hit this API , it will work as like and if you send same parameters second time it will remove record from the vote table i.e unlike

   method: POST
   body: {"votable_id":"1","votable_type":"Post","user_id":"1"}
   content-type: application/json
   response: {"status":200,"message":"liked successfully."}
   

   /api/likes/user?user_id=1

   API returns like count done by a particular user.

   method: GET
   content-type: application/json
   response: {"status":200,"likecount":1,"likes":[{"id":1,...}]}
   

   /api/likes/model?votable_id=1&votable_type=Post

   API returns like count done on a particular model.

   method: GET
   content-type: application/json
   response: {"status":200,"likecount":1,"likes":[{"id":1,...}]}
   

user_id inside request body can be admin_id, it depends on the application’s users model (it’s frequently User but could also be Admin)

Note: Depending on your use case, both features can be used in same application.

Token-based authentication

If you are using Token-based authentication for authorizing requests, You can do in ApplicationController of your app.

# app/controllers/application_controller.rb 
class ApplicationController < ActionController::API 
    before_action :authenticate_request 
    attr_reader :current_user 
    
    private 
    def authenticate_request
       # Here you can read headers and check for current user. this example is for `jwt` check below link for more.
       @current_user = AuthorizeApiRequest.call(request.headers).result render json: { error: 'Not Authorized' }, status: 401 unless @current_user 
    end 
end

Read token-based-authentication-with-ruby-on-rails-5-api blog post for integration.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/thecodinghouse/rails_rest_vote. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.