Deleting Comments In Nested Threads Discussion

How about taking an OO approach i.e. changing the type to DeletedComment, e.g. using STI? This eliminates the code smell of conditionals in a partial.

Chris, what if there are validations on body column?

Unless I'm overlooking something, it seems like you have some duplicate code in the video:

def comments
  Comment.where(commentable: commentable, parent_id: id)
end

def child_comments
  Comment.where(parent: self)
end

While they use slightly different where's the end result will be the same. The commentable: commentable condition is unnecessary, as there should never exist a comment that has a different commentable than its parent.

If you're using Postgres you're likely to run into an issue with this solution due to the following columns being generated when creating the schema:

    t.bigint "user_id", null: false
    t.string "commentable_type", null: false
    t.bigint "commentable_id", null: false

This means when you delete a comment you get the following error:

ERROR:  null value in column "user_id" violates not-null constraint

The workaround that I've implemented is to add a deleted column that defaults to false on the Comments table.

This means we can set deleted to true:

comment.rb

  def destroy
    update(deleted: true)
  end

_comment.html.erb

<% if comment.deleted == true %>
    <h5 class="text-semibold">[Deleted]</h5>
    <p>[deleted]</p>
<% else %>
    <h5 class="text-semibold"><%= comment.user.name %> posted:</h5>
    <%= simple_format(comment.body) %>
<% end %>