Hideable

A simple way to provide hideability to ActiveRecord models. Mark records as hidden instead of destroying them for good.

Usage

Setup

Run the generator to create migrations for all of the models you want to hide:

rails generate hideable:migration Foo Bar
rake db:migrate

Make your models hideable:

class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base
  extend Hideable::ActiveRecord
  hideable
end

This will add #hide!, #unhide! and #hidden? instance methods and .hidden and .not_hidden scopes.

Associations

Hideable is designed to work in a similar way to the :dependent option on associations too, if that's what you want.

class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_one :bar

  extend Hideable::ActiveRecord
  hideable :dependent => :hide
end
    
class Bar < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :foo
      
  extend Hideable::ActiveRecord
  hideable
end

All models that you wish to hide, including dependents, must be declared as hideable.

foo = Foo.not_hidden.first
foo.hide!
foo.bar.hidden? #=> true

Hiding dependents requires the records to be instantiated and can be quite expensive depending on the number of records. You can move the operation into the background where suitable. Instead of :dependent => :hide, use the :updated option to provide a method name or callable that will be called when the object is hidden or unhidden. The following example demonstrates the use of Sidekiq to hide dependents asynchronously.

class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_one :bar

  extend Hideable::ActiveRecord
  hideable :updated => :update_bars

  private
    def update_bars
      HideableWorker.perform_async(self.class.name, self.id)
    end
end
    
class Bar < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :foo
      
  extend Hideable::ActiveRecord
  hideable
end

require 'sidekiq'
class HideableWorker
  include Sidekiq::Worker

  def perform(klass_name, id)
    klass = klass_name.constantize
    klass.find(id).update_hideable_dependencies!
  end
end

Why?

Knowing that you can hide or unhide a record is often better destroying it for good. Other gems – such as paranoia and acts_as_paranoid – do a similar job by overriding #destroy, which I don't like.

Development

Install the general dependencies, including all the versions of activerecord that hideable is tested against.

bundle install && rake appraisal:install

Run tests as follows.

rake appraisal