如何在设计用户之间建立友谊并通过api获取每个用户的朋友列表？

Question

I use devise for authentication in my web application and my web application also responds to iPhone applications. So far I have done only authentication and so when the iPhone app sends the username and password as

http://localhost:3000/login.json  -d "{'user' : { 'username' : 'sample@yahoo.co.in','password' : 'password'}}"

The response would be

{"user":{"authentication_token":"LayzZw3s3gsNMFRJp1JR","email":"sample@yahoo.co.in","username":"sample@yahoo.co.in"}}

But now I need to create friendships between user from iPhone application ie, the user have to send friend request to another user through API and the another user should receive a request

After the user accepts the request the user should be added to the friend list of both users and the friends of the user should be displayed when the user needs by calling API

How can I do this?

Answer 1

This has very little if nothing to do with authentication.

What you need is a FriendshipRequest model that belongs_to both a "asking" user and a "asked" other user. When a user want to request someone to be his friend, he just creates a FriendshipRequest in your db. When the other user consults his page, he sees that friendship request and can either accept it (create a new Friendship object in the db, that belongs_to both users) or discard it (destroy the FriendshipRequest record or mark it as rejected for the other user to see).

all in all, you can even use only a Friendship model with an accepted boolean flag. The rest is classic rails.

Answer 2

As m_x said this has nothing to do with authentication.

What you should create is a self referential associon between users with an has many trhough relationship.

An user has many friends trough friendship (and in the same time has many inverse_friends).

This is very well explained in railscast #163 http://railscasts.com/episodes/163-self-referential-association

In your scenario the inverse_friend should be considered as "friends request" and once a user has both a friend and an inverse friend relation with another user the "friendship" should be considered accepted.