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= Arboreal
Arboreal is yet another extension to ActiveRecord to support tree-shaped data structures.
Arboreal surfaces relationships within the tree like +children+, +ancestors+, +descendants+, and +siblings+ as scopes, so that additional filtering/pagination can be performed.
It delegates as much work as possible to the underlying DBMS, making it efficient to:
== Getting started
First, install the "arboreal" gem, and add it to your Rails project's config/environment.rb.
Next, you'll need a migration to add +parent_id+ and +ancestry_string+ columns, and indices:
class MakeThingsArboreal < ActiveRecord::Migration
def self.up
add_column "things", "parent_id", :integer
add_index "things", ["parent_id"]
add_column "things", "ancestry_string", :string
add_index "things", ["ancestry_string"]
end
def self.down
remove_index "things", ["ancestry_string"]
remove_column "things", "ancestry_string"
remove_index "things", ["parent_id"]
remove_column "things", "parent_id"
end
end
Finally, you can declare your model arboreal:
class Thing < ActiveRecord::Base
acts_arboreal
# .. etc etc ...
end
== Navigating the tree
Arboreal adds the basic relationships you'd expect:
In addition, it provides the following handy methods on each tree-node:
The first four return scopes, to which additional filtering, ordering or limits may be applied.
At the class-level:
== Rebuilding the ancestry cache
Internally, Arboreal uses the +ancestry_string+ column to cache the path down the tree to each node (or more correctly, it's parent. This technique - a variant of "path enumeration" or "materialized paths" - allows efficient retrieval of both ancestors and descendants.
It's conceivable that the computed ancestry-string values may get out of whack, particularly if changes are made directly to the database. If you suspect corruption, you can restore sanity using rebuild_ancestry, e.g
Thing.rebuild_ancestry
The ancestry rebuild is implemented in SQL to leverage the underlying DBMS, and so is pretty efficient, even on large trees.
FAQs
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We found that arboreal demonstrated a not healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released a year ago. It has 1 open source maintainer collaborating on the project.
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