I have a User model who HBTM Friends (class User). I would like to check
for the existance of a user in the friends table before actually adding
them (in case they were already added as a friend.)
I have a method called already_friend_of?(friend) defined in my User
model, but I am not sure how to define this method. I simply want to
check to see if one user is already a friend of another user (I also use
this method in my views to change the state of some links and buttons -
for example, the ‘add friend’ button becomes ‘remove friend’.)
My method currently looks like this, but it doesn’t seem to be
working…
def already_friend_of?(friend)
begin
self.friends.find(friend)
true
rescue
false
end
end
I appreciate any hints you can give me regarding this matter.
def already_friend_of?(friend)
begin
self.friends.find(friend.id)
true
rescue
false
end
end
I think this is going to be very expensive because you’re calling this
method on many pages (and more times per page). If you are just checking
whether the current (logged in) user has this friend, you’d better
create a method that gets a list of id’s from the database. These id’s
are the id’s of her friends.
Then the check method will be:
def friend_of?(friend) @friend_ids.include?(friend.id)
end
And you would need a method like load_friend_ids that populates the @friend_ids array.