Custom db fields

[mbajur]

Hello,
first of all - thank you for creating this amazing gem, you saved me a lot of work and i really appreciate it :)

Anyway, i have a small problem. I'm creating an app - let's call it an online restaurants catalogue. There are two models: Spot and City

What i need to do is to be able to display an activity stream on single Spot's profile but i also want to display activity streams on City's profiles (activity streams of spots which belongs to this city, not city's streams itself). Offcourse i can use params parameter for create_activity method when tracking Spot activity but it would be probably not quite optimal to query City's activity using SQL LIKE statements (they are quite heavy, right?). I decided it would better to add a column to activities table in which i will keep the city ID.

Is there any way to use custom table columns without hacking a public_activity source code ? Unfortunatelly, this code won't work:

@spot.create_activity key: 'spot.update', city_id: @spot.city.id

Thank you for any help!

[pokonski]

Glad you like it!

You are right, querying a serialized column would be a pain, so it is highly advised against doing that.

In the early days of the gem I also was adding custom columns. The solution circumvents parts of the gem, but if you absolutely need it can be done like this:

1. Create a migration which adds desired columns to activities table
2. Skip using #create_activity method, and access the Activity model directly:

PublicActivity::Activity.create key: 'spot.update', trackable: @spot, params: {...}, city_id: @spot.city_id, owner: current_user

Please note that this completely ignores your defaults set in Spot model (inside the #tracked method), so you are on your own with setting :owner or other defaults you have.

Note to self: this might be a good idea to allow passing custom column values to #create_activity.

EDIT: Included :trackable attribute which I forgot.

[stas]

Lately I see a lot of people asking question about how to use this gem.
I suggest we get a mailing list or something. Since a lot of people receive such emails which are not relevant to the development.

[pokonski]

@stas good idea.

[mbajur]

Thank you for your help @pokonski , work's great! :)

[farnoy]

I will implement this and inform you on the progress here.

[farnoy]

This works well, I think, but two things are needed: migration and whitelist addition for the attribute.

[farnoy]

This is definitely coming to 1.0

[owenstrevor]

After searching for a while, this worked for me when I wanted to add a custom field which is a reference to a model with a uuid as the id.