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Aaidenplays
Aaidenplays

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Friend requests made simple using javascript and a rails api

Loads of modern apps employ some sort of friends list feature. The ability to create relationships among users has become a common-place practice that brings people together via technology. In this blog I am going to share what I believe is the simplest way to implement associations amongst users via friend requests and a friends list.

As a student of Flatiron’s software engineering course, we are challenged with completing five projects during our 15 week program. Both my second and third projects implemented a friend’s list feature. I did a good deal of research on how to implement friends lists. Ultimately my group members and I were able to come up with a method that I believe to be the easiest to understand as well as code. I am using a rails api for my backend and vanilla javascript for my front.

This method uses two models: users and friends list.

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Seen above is a diagram to help you visualize this relationship. The User class has two subclasses called as_receiver and as_requestor which act like separate models themselves. FriendRequest acts a join table between our two User subclasses.

Inside of these models we can create their associations using these keywords:
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As you can see there is only one User model, but when we define a relationship in this manner we get two subclasses associated between FriendRequest and User.
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Once these relationships are created we have to add their IDs into the migration files:
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Notice I didn’t add anything special into my CreateUsers table
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CreateFriendRequests is where the magic happens. We now have two User ID’s being associated through this table. The user that initiates the friendship is stored into the requestor_id slot while the receiver of that friend request is stored into receiver_id. Status will have one of two possibilities: “pending” and “accepted”.
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This would be the logic behind an add friend button. A post request is made to create an instance of FriendRequest which associates the current user as_requestor with another user as_receiver.
After that is done it doesn’t take much to show pending requests. Iterating through all FriendRequests(request=each iteration):
else if ((request.requestor.id == u1.id || request.receiver.id == u1.id) && request.status == 'pending'){

Accepting the request simply makes a patch request to our rails backend to change the status of the request to “accepted”
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Declining the request is even simpler as it just destroys that friend request altogether:
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Once the request is accepted its as easy to show as it was to show pending requests.
if ((request.requestor.id == u1.id || request.receiver.id == u1.id) && request.status == 'accepted'){

I hope this blog is useful for anyone who is looking to implement a friends feature in their program!

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