Dynamic Like & Dislike Buttons in Your Rails 6 Application
How to implement a like button the simple way
When I first started with Ruby on Rails, one of the exercises that we had to do was to recreate the structure of Twitter — a user could post short ‘messages’, follow and be followed by other users.
We did this for two reasons: the first to show that the technology behind Twitter — at the time built using Ruby on Rails — was quite simple if you looked under the hood. The second was to understand how polymorphic (many-to-many) relationships worked in a relational database.
A like inside of an application is really a save for later. It is a way to access a smaller subset of data in a sea of records. In relational databases using SQL, likes are typically stored on their own table. However, creating that relationship is kind of a pain. Luckily, with Ruby, there’s always a gem to make things simpler. For this demo, I’ll use acts-as-favoritor.
Let’s get started.
Step 1: Set up an application with two models
To get starting with liking, you need just two things:
- A model that performs the liking action (the user)
- A model that is liked (any object like a book, a restaurant…
