Douglas

Status: Rough edges are to be expected.

Douglas is a Ruby gem that adds the ability to easily add created_by and updated_by attributes to any ActiveRecord model. It allows easy user-stamping for any Active Record model.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'douglas'

And then execute:

$ bundle

When added in a Rails application, Douglas adds a generator which enables the users to easily generate migrations which need to be stamped.

To generate these migrations, you can use Douglas' table generator:

rails generate douglas:table NAME

This will generate a migration:

create  db/migrate/20170322225126_add_created_by_and_updated_by_to_<model-name>.rb

The contents of this migration will be:

class AddCreatedByAndUpdatedByTo<model-name> < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
  def change
    add_column :<model-name>, :created_by, :integer, null: false
    add_column :<model-name>, :updated_by, :integer, null: false

    add_index :<model-name>, :created_by
    add_index :<model-name>, :updated_by
  end
end

In your ApplicationController add a before_action:

class ApplicationController
  before_action :set_douglas_the_stamper
end

This will enable Douglas to know the current user that peroforms the action (create/update) on an model object.

In the model (that you ran the generate task for), add this:

class User < ApplicationRecord
  has_stamps
end

This will populat the created_by and updated_by attributes accordintly. Under the hood this injects callbacks that are executed before create and update.

Since the {created,updated}_by columns cannot be null it means that the Douglas.the_stamper has to always be set to a value. This is normally done via the controller before_filter method, but in console you have to use the Douglas.with_stamper method. This method expects two arguments, an identifier of the user that does the action and a block. This means that the user will be logged as the person that has done the actions within the block.

For example:

>> Douglas.with_stamper(123) do
?>   p = Post.first
>>   p.body = 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet''
>>   p.save
>> end

The Post will be updated, and the updated_by attribute will be set to the first passed argument - 123.

• Add migrations generator (#1)
• Find way to hijack current_user and store in RequestStore
• Find way to plug-in Douglas in model lifecycle
• Improve README quality
• Add tests
• Make logged attribute (currently id) to be configurable

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/[USERNAME]/douglas. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

Named after Douglas "Doug" Stamper, President Frank Underwood's White House Chief of Staff and former director of strategy.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.