…or is my friend’s friend my friend too?
Recently I tried to implement a feature that is commonly used in social sites like Xing or Linked-in: a friends list, also known as buddy list or contacts list. Basically this means that a user can link to any other user to indicate that they are friends or know each other. Normally, the other party has to confirm the link proposition for the link to be established. Having a contact network, the site can implement various cool features, like finding the shortest path between two random users or telling you that there are ’820 contacts of your contacts’.
Implementing this proved not to be that easy in Ruby on Rails, partly because of lack of documentation and mostly because of my poor knowledge of Rails, so here’s a solution that works for me. It should be noted that this is rather a story of trial and error (although I will spare you visiting all the blind alleys with me) than an emanation of guru-like knowledge, so if anyone knows a better way, I’ll be glad to hear about it.
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