Paranoia is a gem that allows you to hide records instead of destroying them. You can recover them later if you want. It’s a very simple reimplementation of ActsAsParanoid (one file with about 300 lines of code).
I assume you have a Rails app with User, Conversation and Message models created with basic views added to conversations showing authors and messages.
What You Will Use
Pros:
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very simple gem,
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easy to debug (only one file),
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it does what it sets out to do,
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actively maintained,
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nice documentation.
Cons:
Step 1
Add paranoia gem to your Gemfile:
gem 'paranoia', git: 'git@github.com:rubysherpas/paranoia.git', branch: 'core'
You add it like that because the newest release doesn’t include some features that will be used in this tutorial.
Step 2
Now, let’s say that you want to delete a user, but his messages should still be displayed with his name as an author (in your view you’ll have something like message.user.name). If you removed that user, you would get an error when trying to display his messages:
undefined method `name` for nil:NilClass
In order to avoid that, instead of destroying records, you should mark them as deleted. It’s called soft deleting and it’s what paranoia gem is all about.
To enable this behaviour for User model, add this line to it:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
acts_as_paranoid
[...]
You also need to generate and run this migration:
rails generate migration AddDeletedAtToUsers deleted_at:datetime:index
rake db:migrate
From now on, calling destroy on any user will set deleted_at to a current date instead of actually destroying the record.
Step 3
But, if you try to softly delete a user and display his messages, you’ll still get the same error as before. That’s because paranoia gem changes the default_scope of a model, so every query will treat softly deleted records as if they weren’t there (WHERE "users"."deleted_at" IS NULL will be added to queries). Of course, if you love your default_scope and you don’t ever want it to change, you can achieve that:
# not available in the newest release, you have to add paranoia gem as in step 1
acts_as_paranoid without_default_scope: true
You can also access your softly deleted user record in other ways:
If you need to include or ignore softly deleted records in other places, there are several ways to do that in addition to the methods above:
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User.with_deleted, User.without_deleted and User.only_deleted scopes
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you can check if a record is softly deleted by using user.paranoia_destroyed? or user.deleted? methods
Note that if you want your indexes to ignore softly deleted records, you have to modify them as follows:
add_index :users, :some_column, where: "deleted_at IS NULL"
Step 4
If you want to restore a user, use this code:
User.restore(message.user.id)
or
Message.user.restore
Step 5
What if you want to softly delete a user and all of his messages? You can do that simply by implementing acts_as_paranoid for the Message model (as in step 2, you also need to add a migration) and then using dependent: :destroy
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
acts_as_paranoid
has_many :messages, dependent: :destroy
[...]
Note that if you didn’t implement acts_as_paranoid for Message model, the messages would be destroyed normally and you wouldn’t be able to restore them. Also, restoring the user doesn’t restore all of his messages unless you use:
User.restore(user_id, recursive: true)
or
user.restore(recursive: true)
Summary
Paranoia is a really simple gem that makes soft deleting easier. If you need such a simple functionality and you don’t need a better control that comes with implementing your own solution, choosing paranoia should work very well.