[How to] Use custom fields on Activity

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Besides the few fields that every Activity has (key, owner, recipient, trackable, parameters), you can also set custom fields. This could be very beneficial, as parameters are a serialized hash, which cannot be queried easily from the database. That being said, use custom fields when you know that you will set them very often and search by them (don't forget database indexes :) ).

Setup

Skip this step if you are using ActiveRecord in Rails 4 or Mongoid

The first step is similar in every ORM available (except mongoid):

PublicActivity::Activity.class_eval do
  attr_accessible :custom_field
end

place this code under config/initializers/public_activity.rb, you have to create it first.

To be able to assign to that field, we need to move it to the mass assignment sanitizer's whitelist.

Migration

If you're using ActiveRecord, you will also need to provide a migration to add the actual field to the Activity. Taken from our tests:

class AddCustomFieldToActivities < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    change_table :activities do |t|
      t.string :custom_field
    end
  end
end

Assigning custom fields

Assigning is done by the same methods that you use for normal parameters: #tracked, #create_activity. You can just pass the name of your custom variable and assign its value. Even better, you can pass it to #tracked to tell us how to harvest your data for custom fields so we can do that for you.

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  include PublicActivity::Model
  tracked custom_field: proc {|controller, model| controller.some_helper }
end