Different Types of Badges

[zackyap]

My project needed different types of badges like Foursquare's: Foursquare, Expertise and Partner badges. Some would have levels, some would not. It's probably a matter of adding a field called type to the Badge model.

Is there a better way of adding fields to the model other than having them coded into the gem? Not too sure about the ambry gem but could it be possible to extend the Badge class and just add the fields there?

[tute]

Interesting question. Tried subclassing Badge for adding the Ambry field but couldn't make it work:

require 'ambry'
require 'ambry/active_model'

class MyAppBadge < Badge
  extend Ambry::Model
  extend Ambry::ActiveModel

  field :type
end
Badge.new.attributes # => {"id"=>nil, "name"=>nil, "level"=>nil, "image"=>nil, "description"=>nil} 
MyAppBadge.new.attributes # => {"type"=>nil} 

@norman, do you think an Ambry model should be extendable like this?

[tute]

Meanwhile, this seems to work:

require 'ambry'
require 'ambry/active_model'

class MyAppBadge < Badge
  extend Ambry::Model
  extend Ambry::ActiveModel

  field *Badge.new.attributes.keys, :type
end
Badge.new.attributes.keys # => {"id"=>nil, "name"=>nil, "level"=>nil, "image"=>nil, "description"=>nil} 
MyAppBadge.new.attributes # => {"id"=>nil, "name"=>nil, "level"=>nil, "image"=>nil, "description"=>nil, "type"=>nil} 

[zackyap]

This makes sense. Thanks for trying it out.
I'll try it out too but if there's a better way, I think it'd help open up a few possibilities in terms of what badges can do depending on app design.

[tute]

ambry closed the related issue, with a nice code example and explanation on why do they prefer inclusion of modules to solve an issue like this, instead of subclassing. It works elegantly, and you can find it in: norman/ambry#13 (comment)

Thanks for your feedback!

[Shpigford]

Would this be the way to group/indicate badges that are harder to get?

For instance, Stack Overflow's badge system has Gold, Silver and Bronze badges. Gold are rare and require quite a bit more work to get and Bronze are the easiest.

[tute]

If you don't use the :level badge option for anything else, it applies for this problem.

[tute]

Now fixed in merit master as of 97c998f