Understanding Rails/Twitter On-click tweet on behalf of user

Question

As preface, I've followed through some tutorials (i.e. Michael Hartl's) though I'm still fairly novice. Forgive any cloudy terminology.

I am trying to build a simple application in Rails 4 that does the following:

User logs into application (currently working with sign-in-with-twitter link and routing)

get "/auth/:provider/callback" => "sessions#create"
get "/signout" => "sessions#destroy", :as => :signout

Once <% if current_user %> is true, I have the view rendering a partial where there will be a list of simple buttons. When the user clicks a button I want the application to tweet on behalf of the current_user a preset string. Ideally, I'd do this all in ruby/rails.

These button functions are where I'm getting hung up. I've read a fistful of documents but there seem to be a lot of conflicting and old answers. Here's a quick list of the ones I think are closest, though not explicit about sending a tweet from a simple button/link in a view:

• http://www.sitepoint.com/ruby-social-gems-twitter/
• http://richonrails.com/articles/sending-a-tweet-to-twitter

Some call for controllers, a more robust oauth setup (which I have bundle installed and connected to the dev.twitter application, though not fleshed out beyond keys), and whatever else. It's got me turned around and I'm not yet good enough to synthesize all the information. Any help and direction would be great. Below are some other files in the app that might be helpful.

class SessionsController < ApplicationController

def create
  auth = request.env["omniauth.auth"]
  user = User.find_by_provider_and_uid(auth["provider"], auth["uid"]) || User.create_with_omniauth(auth)
  session[:user_id] = user.id
  redirect_to root_url, :notice => "Hi!"
end

def destroy
  session[:user_id] = nil
  redirect_to root_url, :notice => "Bye!"
end
end

And omniauth.rb

Rails.application.config.middleware.use OmniAuth::Builder do
provider :twitter, '_priv', '_priv'
end

Answer 1

Eep! I'm the author of the second link (RichOnRails). Did you take a look at the example app included with the tutorial? It does almost exactly what you want. If the tweets are hard coded you could approach it in a couple of different ways. If you take a look at the tweets controller, you'll see it takes a parameter called 'message'. Any message passed to that create method will tweet as the current user.

    def create
      current_user.tweet(twitter_params[:message])
    end

The easiest (but not necessarily best) way to adapt this to fit your needs is to have a form for each tweet, and do a hidden field with the message you wish to tweet. The button becomes a submit for that particular form (you can add remote: true if you want to keep the page from refreshing, then use a bit of javascript to update the UI elements). Hope this helps.