Drafty

Drafty is a Rails plugin that gives you a quick and easy way to save draft copies of objects. Parts of it are loosely based on has_draft by railsgarden.

Installation

script/plugin install git@github.com:factore/drafty.git

Usage

For this example we’ll be creating drafts of articles. Articles have a title, content, and they belong to an author.

First create the table for your drafts. This should essentially be a copy of your articles table, but with a new integer field called “draft_parent_id”

class CreateArticleDrafts > ActiveRecord::Migration def self.up create_table :article_drafts, :force => true do t.string :title t.text :content t.integer :author_id t.integer :draft_parent_id # Required for Drafty t.timestamps # Required for Drafty end end def self.down drop_table :article_drafts end end

Next make your article model drafty!

class Article > ActiveRecord::Base is_drafty belongs_to :author validates_presence_of :title end

Drafty adds a few methods to your Article class while largely trying to stay out of your way. First, let’s look at how we create a draft copy.

class ArticlesController > ApplicationController def create_draft Article.create_draft(params[:article], params[:id]) redirect_to edit_article_path(params[:id]) end end

Just pass it your article params hash from the form, as well as the ID of the article that you’re creating a draft for. Drafty doesn’t care about your validations,
so go ahead and save drafts of your half finished articles.

Pulling out the latest revision of a given article is easy as well.

class ArticlesController > ApplicationController def edit @article = Article.draft_find(params[:id]) end end

No matter what, you’ll receive an instance of Article, however, the attributes are taken from either the most recent draft,
or the article itself, depending on which has the newest updates.

You can also revert to the last official saved article, get a collection of all the drafts, and load up a specific draft.

@article = Article.find(params[:id]) @article.revert # Article.draft_find(params[:id]) will now return @article @article.drafts # Returns a collection of all drafts of this article, from newest to oldest @article.load_draft(params[:draft_id]) # Replaces @article’s attributes with those of a specific draft.

Given these tools, how you choose to implement and use Drafty is up to you!

Copyright © 2009 factor[e] design initiative, released under the MIT license