Concerns

Concerns are little modules that encapsulate reusable functionality. Rather than adding them to our models and controllers directly, we put them in a module and include them.

An example of a concern might be “Taggable”, or “Ratable” or “HasImage”

Exercise - HasImage

We are going to create a HasImage concern which will add standard paperclip functionality to our BlogPost. We will be able to use it like this:

  class BlogPost < ActiveRecord::Base
    include HasImage
  end

Define your concern in a module in the app/models/concerns directory. To be automatically imported the file must be have the same name as the module, with underscores.

Because Paperclip requires you to work with the class directly we are going to use the included callback to add class methods to our module, like so:

  module HasImage
    def self.included(klass)
      klass.extend ClassMethods
    end

    module ClassMethods
    end
  end

The Paperclip documentation can be found here:

https://github.com/thoughtbot/paperclip

Remember to write specs for your concern.

Further exercise

Create a Rateable concern to allow users to rate content. The model should gain thumbs_up and thumbs_down methods, and a rating method. Store the data either in a field, or in a separate Rating model which belongs to the User model (if you have one)