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Advanced ActionText: Attaching any Model in rich text by Chris Oliver Whether it's @ mentions for users, hashtags, or other resources, many application these days need rich text fields. ActionText allows you to embed rich snippets for any model in your Rails app, but it requires a bit of communication with the backend. You'll learn how to add @ mentions for users and YouTube embeds as ActionText attachments and see how it all works together. __________ Chris is the founder of GoRails, host of the Remote Ruby podcast, and creator of Jumpstart and Hatchbox.io. He loves building tools to make developers' lives easier and helping people learn to code.
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In this video presentation at RailsConf 2020, Chris Oliver discusses advanced usage of ActionText, a rich text editor integrated into Rails. The session focuses on how developers can attach any model to rich text fields, enhancing their applications' interactivity and flexibility. Key points covered include: - **Introduction to ActionText**: ActionText serves as a rich text editor, allowing users to format text, add images, and utilize HTML rather than markdown. This integration simplifies complex text features like user mentions and file uploads. - **File Upload Integration**: Unlike markdown, ActionText handles file uploads smoothly by integrating with Active Storage, ensuring multimedia elements are embedded correctly and stored as HTML. - **Resolving User Mentions**: Chris highlights how traditional methods of managing user mentions can lead to outdated references. ActionText dynamically links mentions to current database records using signed global IDs, ensuring fresh data is always displayed. - **Adding Rich Text Fields**: The speaker explains how to add rich text fields easily through Rails generators, demonstrating how the `has_rich_text` method works by internally managing associations without the need for additional database columns. - **Embedding External Content**: Oliver describes the procedure for embedding content from external sources like YouTube. By customizing the Trix editor's behavior using JavaScript, developers can detect embedded video URLs, process them, and render them appropriately. - **User Mentions with Tribute.js**: The presentation delves into utilizing Tribute.js to enhance user mention features. By detecting specific text patterns, Tribute.js allows for autocompletion of user names while preserving dynamic references to their latest data. - **Complexity and Flexibility of ActionText**: Although ActionText offers robust features for managing rich content, Chris emphasizes the added complexity of using signed global IDs. Encoding and rendering dynamic links and attachments require careful management within the backend and editor's interface. In conclusion, the implementation of ActionText offers a powerful way to enrich user interactions in Rails applications by allowing attachments to real-time models and data, thereby presenting users with the most accurate and engaging experience. Chris encourages developers to explore the source code available on GitHub, highlighting the practical examples and features introduced in his talk.
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