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[How to] Use custom fields on Activity
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 :) ).
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.
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 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