Comment notification to users in rails?

Question

Hi, my webapp has registered users and it has articles, blog posts, gossips too. For all these resources I've a polymorphic Comment model which is listed below.

id  content         commentable_id  commentable_type   user_id  created_at  updated_at
1   Frist comment   2               Article            1        ....
2   Second comment  3               Post               2        .....

So for each commentable resource, I've a comment form at the bottom of the commentable resource for users to comment. I want a checkbox, when checked while submitting the comment, the users should receive a notification, be it in Inbox or email since we already have it on user signup, when other new comments are added later.

I want to have some model like Notifications where I could store the commentable_type, commentable_id and user_id (to whom the notification should be sent if there is any new comment created with the matching commentable and user?

How can I implement the association between Comment and Notification? For the checking part if there is any one subscribe to the particular commentable resource is create a CommentObserver with after_create hook to initialize the search and send notifications if there is any matching record.

But I'm confused what the association, model, controller and views would look like to accomplish this? Since the comment model is already polymorphic, can I create the Notification model as polymorphic too??

Answer 1

You can easily accomplish this without a plugin. Create a database table to store User notification subscriptions for posts. Then, each time you create a comment, query the database and send an email using ActionMailer to all users' address.