I am putting together a messaging system for a rails app I am working on.
I am building it in a similar fashion to facebook's system, so messages are grouped into threads, etc.
My related models are:
MsgThread - main container of a thread
Message - each message/reply in thread
Recipience - ties to user to define which users should subscribe to this thread
Read - determines whether or not a user has read a specific message
My relationships look like
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
#stuff...
has_many :msg_threads, :foreign_key => 'originator_id' #threads the user has started
has_many :recipiences
has_many :subscribed_threads, :through => :recipiences, :source => :msg_thread #threads the user is subscribed to
end
class MsgThread < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :messages
has_many :recipiences
belongs_to :originator, :class_name => "User", :foreign_key => "originator_id"
end
class Recipience < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :user
belongs_to :msg_thread
end
class Message < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :msg_thread
belongs_to :author, :class_name => "User", :foreign_key => "author_id"
end
class Read < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :user
belongs_to :message
end
I'd like to create a new selector in the user sort of like:
has_many :updated_threads, :through => :recipiencies, :source => :msg_thread, :conditions => {THREAD CONTAINS MESSAGES WHICH ARE UNREAD (have no 'read' models tying a user to a message)}
I was thinking of either writing a long condition with multiple joins, or possibly writing giving the model an updated_threads method to return this, but I'd like to see if there is an easier way first.
Any ideas? Also, if there is something fundamentally wrong with my structure for this functionality let me know! Thanks!!
