Announcing a new positioning gem: positioning

rubyonrails-talk
1

I’m the maintainer of the acts_as_list and ranked-model gems and recently I’ve written a new positioning gem of my own. It’s named unimaginatively: positioning.

It takes the best of both of the aforementioned gems and adds an advisory lock to guarantee sequential list operations:

  • Doesn’t pollute the model namespace (inspired by ranked-model)
  • Uses sequential integer position values like acts_as_list.
  • Honours uniqueness constraints when expanding and contracting space in the list.
  • Promotes the use of relative positioning over explicit positioning (e.g. before: other_list_member)
  • Does its best to prevent gaps in the position sequence via clamping and an advisory lock.
  • Allows more than one list to exist per model (like ranked-model)
  • Scope by belongs_to relationship, model column, a combination of the two, or not at all!
  • Automatically handles moving list items between scopes (like acts_as_list and ranked-model).

I’m using it in production and encourage others to take a look and provide feedback.

I’ll still be maintaining acts_as_list and ranked-model so don’t fret :smiley:

7 Likes
2

This looks very promising and has handy create/update helpers. Project looks neat, well done. I’m currently an ‘Ancestry’ gem user, but will definitely look into the ‘Positioning’ gem.

I like the idea how to easily assign positions using your gem:

item.create position: :last
item.create position: {before: 22}
item.update position: {after: other_item}
etc.
3

Thanks @Frank1, I use ancestry too! :slight_smile: It’s a very useful gem. I’ve actually used it in conjunction with acts_as_list and ranked-model in different projects to have an ordered tree. It’s easy to scope to the ancestry column. I haven’t tried that with my gem but I assume it’d work fine. Let me know how it goes :slight_smile: