Method to find posts in children categories

Question

I use the gem act_as_votable to allow users to select categories they like. To get the categories a user likes:

 current_user.get_voted(Category)

These categories have children categories, and I need to find the posts in those children categories.

I use this line to do it:

@categories_posts = current_user.get_voted(Category).flat_map { |category| category.children.flat_map(&:posts)}.delete_if{ |post| post.status == "draft"}

But I noticed in my logs that this was doing way too much computation for this task.

Is there a way to make it lighter ?

Answer 1

Some notes:

• You should limit the lines to 80/100 chars.
• When a call chain seems to include too much logic, move it to methods/class-methods of models.

As a first refactor, I'd implement Category#with_children and then write:

@categories_posts = current_user.
 get_voted(Category).
 flat_map(&:with_children).
 flat_map(&:posts).
 reject { |post| post.status == "draft" }

On a second refactor, it's nice to have relations instead of arrays as output. This way you can use scopes, paginators and such, even if you cannot directly use has_many here (because of the recursive category requirement):

categories = current_user.get_voted(Category).flat_map(&:with_children)
@categories_posts = Post.where(category: categories).published

That's to show the implementation, on the controller you should still have less logic, something like this: @categories_posts = current_user.posts_of_voted_categories.published.

• Graham Slick: Thanks for your input ! This indeed makes the code more readable, but does it make it more efficient ?
• tokland: Updated, now it should be more efficient, it's using SQL from the category level.