Question

I am using this gem for private messages: https://github.com/jongilbraith/simple-private-messages

I want to create a thread conversation instead of the e-mail conversation the scaffold have provided.

Example, User A have sent 10 messages to User B. User A have also sent 10 messages to User C.

Instead of looping through all the messages. (e-mail look) I want to create a threat like:

Inbox

Conversation with User A (10 messages)
Conversation with User C (10 messages) 

And when clicking on the conversation the messages should be ordered after date. So it would be like a conversation.

The table for messages:

id
sender_id
recipient_id
sender_deleted
recipient_deleted
subject
body
read_at
created_at
updated_at

How do I create these views? How do I group the messages?

Answer 1

Short answer is: you can’t with that gem. You’ll have to extend it and add a Conversation model then bridge that between users and messages.

I propose, instead, you use this gem:

https://github.com/ging/mailboxer

Far more powerful than your current gem, and it comes with conversations out of the box. I’ve used it before to mimic a gmail-like view.

From the guide:

#alfa wants to retrieve all his conversations
alfa.mailbox.conversations

#A wants to retrieve his inbox
alfa.mailbox.inbox

#A wants to retrieve his sent conversations
alfa.mailbox.sentbox

#alfa wants to retrieve his trashed conversations
alfa.mailbox.trash

Easy as pie:

current_user.mailbox.conversations.each do |convo|
  convo.subject
  ...
end