1Maypole::Manual::Flox(3U)ser Contributed Perl DocumentatiMoanypole::Manual::Flox(3)
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6 Maypole::Manual::Flox - Flox: A Free Social Networking Site
7
9 Friendster, Tribe, and now Google's Orkut - it seems like in early
10 2004, everyone wanted to be a social networking site. At the time, I
11 was too busy to be a social networking site, as I was working on my own
12 project at the time - Maypole. However, I realised that if I could
13 implement a social networking system using Maypole, then Maypole could
14 probably do anything.
15 I'd already decided there was room for a free, open-source networking
17 site, and then Peter Sergeant came up with the hook - localizing it to
18 universities and societies, and tying in meet-ups with restaurant
19 bookings. I called it Flox, partially because it flocks people together
20 and partially because it's localised for my home town of Oxford and its
21 university student population.
22 Flox is still in, uh, flux, but it does the essentials. We're going to
24 see how it was put together, and how the techniques shown in the
25 Request Cookbook can help to create a sophisticated web application. Of
26 course, I didn't have this manual available at the time, so it took a
27 bit longer than it should have done...
28 Mapping the concepts
30 Any Maypole application should start with two things: a database
31 schema, and some idea of what the pages involved are going to look
32 like. Usually, these pages will be displaying or editing some element
33 of the database, so these two concepts should come hand in hand.
34 When I started looking at social networking sites, I began by
36 identifying the concepts which were going to make up the tables of the
37 application. At its most basic, a site like Orkut or Flox has two
38 distinct concepts: a user, and a connection between two users.
39 Additionally, there's the idea of an invitation to a new user, which
40 can be extended, accepted, declined or ignored. These three will make
41 up the key tables; there are an extra two tables in Flox, but they're
42 essentially enumerations that are a bit easier to edit: each user has
43 an affiliation to a particular college or department, and a status in
44 the university. (Undergraduate, graduate, and so on.)
45 For this first run-through, we're going to ignore the ideas of
47 societies and communities, and end up with a schema like so:
48 CREATE TABLE user (
50 id int not null auto_increment primary key,
51 first_name varchar(50),
52 last_name varchar(50),
53 email varchar(255),
54 profile text,
55 password varchar(255),
56 affiliation int,
57 unistatus int,
58 status ENUM("real", "invitee"),
59 photo blob,
60 photo_type varchar(30)
61 );
62 CREATE TABLE connection (
64 id int not null auto_increment primary key,
65 from_user int,
66 to_user int,
67 status ENUM("offered", "confirmed")
68 );
69 CREATE TABLE invitation (
71 id char(32) not null primary key,
72 issuer int,
73 recipient int,
74 expires date
75 );
76 Plus the definition of our two auxiliary tables:
78 CREATE TABLE affiliation (
80 id int not null auto_increment primary key,
81 name varchar(255)
82 );
83 CREATE TABLE unistatus (
85 id int not null auto_increment primary key,
86 name varchar(255)
87 );
88 Notice that, for simplicity, invitations and friendship connections are
90 quite similar: they are extended from one user to another. This means
91 that people who haven't accepted an invite yet still have a place in
92 the user table, with a different "status". Similarly, a connection
93 between users can be offered, and when it is accepted, its status is
94 changed to "confirmed" and a reciprocal relationship put in place.
95 We also have some idea, based on what we want to happen, of what pages
97 and actions we're going to define. Leaving the user aside for the
98 moment, we want an action which extends an invitation from the current
99 user to a new user. We want a page the new user can go to in order to
100 accept that invitation. Similarly, we want an action which offers a
101 friendship connection to an existing user, and a page the user can go
102 to to accept or reject it. This gives us five pages so far:
103 invitation/issue
105 invitation/accept
106 user/befriend
108 connection/accept
109 connection/reject
110 Notice that the "befriend" action is performed on a user, not a
112 connection. This is distinct from "invitation/issue" because when
113 befriending, we have a real user on the system that we want to do
114 something to. This makes sense if you think of it in terms of object
115 oriented programming - we could say
116 Flox::Connection->create(to => $user)
118 but it's clearer to say
120 $user->befriend
122 Similarly, we could say
124 Flox::User->create({ ... })->issue_invitation_to
126 but it's clearer to say
128 Flox::Invitation->issue( to => Flox::User->create({ ... }) )
130 because it more accurately reflects the principal subject and object of
132 these actions.
133 Returning to look at the user class, we want to be able to view a
135 user's profile, edit one's own profile, set up the profile for the
136 first time, upload pictures and display pictures. We also need to
137 handle the concepts of logging in and logging out.
138 As usual, though, we'll start with a handler class which sets up the
140 database:
141 package Flox;
143 use Maypole::Application;
144 Flox->setup("dbi:mysql:flox");
145 Flox->config->display_tables([qw[user invitation connection]]);
146 1;
147 Very simple, as these things are meant to be. Now let's build on it.
149 Users and Authentication
151 The concept of a current user is absolutely critical in a site like
152 Flox; it represents "me", the viewer of the page, as the site explores
153 the connections in my world. We've described the authentication hacks
154 briefly in the Request Cookbook, but now it's time to go into a little
155 more detail about how user handling is done.
156 We also want to be able to refer to the current user from the
158 templates, so we use the overridable "additional_data" method in the
159 driver class to give us a "my" template variable:
160 sub additional_data {
162 my $r = shift; $r->template_args->{my} = $r->user;
163 }
164 I've called it "my" rather than "me" because we it lets us check "[%
166 my.name %]", and so on.
167 Viewing a user
169 The first page that a user will see after logging in will be their own
170 profile, so in order to speed development, we'll start by getting a
171 "user/view" page up.
172 The only difference from a programming point of view between this
174 action and the default "view" action is that, if no user ID is given,
175 then we want to view "me", the current user. Remembering that the
176 default view action does nothing, our "Flox::User::view" action only
177 needs to do nothing plus ensure it has a user in the "objects" slot,
178 putting "$r->{user}" in there if not:
179 sub view :Exported {
181 my ($class, $r) = @_;
182 $r->objects([ $r->user ]) unless @{ $r->objects || [] };
183 }
184 Maypole, unfortunately, is very good at making programming boring. The
186 downside of having to write very little code at all is that we now have
187 to spend most of our time writing nice HTML for the templates.
188 Pictures of Users
190 The next stage is viewing the user's photo. Assuming we've got the
191 photo stored in the database already (which is a reasonable assumption
192 for the moment since we don't have a way to upload a photo quite yet)
193 then we can use a variation of the "Displaying pictures" hack from the
194 Request Cookbook:
195 sub view_picture :Exported {
197 my ($self, $r) = @_;
198 my $user = $r->objects->[0] || $r->user;
199 if ($r->content_type($user->photo_type)) {
200 $r->output($user->photo);
201 } else {
202 # Read no-photo photo
203 $r->content_type("image/png");
204 $r->output(slurp_file("images/no-photo.png"));
205 }
206 }
207 We begin by getting a user object, just like in the "view" action:
209 either the user whose ID was passed in on the URL, or the current user.
210 Then we check if a "photo_type" has been set in this user's record. If
211 so, then we'll use that as the content type for this request, and the
212 data in the "photo" attribute as the data to send out. The trick here
213 is that setting "$r->{output}" overrides the whole view class
214 processing and allows us to write the content out directly.
215 In our template, we can now say
217 <IMG SRC="[%base%]/user/view_picture/[% user.id %]">
219 and the appropriate user's mugshot will appear.
221 However, if we're throwing big chunks of data around like "photo", it's
223 now worth optimizing the "User" class to ensure that only pertitent
224 data is fetched by default, and "photo" and friends are only fetched on
225 demand. The "lazy population" section of Class::DBI's man page explains
226 how to group the columns by usage so that we can optimize fetches:
227 Flox::User->columns(Primary => qw/id/);
229 Flox::User->columns(Essential => qw/status/);
230 Flox::User->columns(Helpful => qw/ first_name last_name email password/)
231 Flox::User->columns(Display => qw/ profile affiliation unistatus /);
232 Flox::User->columns(Photo => qw/ photo photo_type /);
233 This means that the status and ID columns will always be retrieved when
235 we deal with a user; next, any one of the name, email or password
236 columns will cause that group of data to be retrieved; if we go on to
237 display more information about a user, we also load up the profile,
238 affiliation and university status; finally, if we're throwing around
239 photos, then we load in the photo type and photo data.
240 These groupings are somewhat arbitrary, and there needs to be a lot of
242 profiling to determine the most efficient groupings of columns to load,
243 but they demonstrate one principle about working in Maypole: this is
244 the first time in dealing with Maypole that we've had to explicitly
245 list the columns of a table, but Maypole has so far Just Worked.
246 There's a difference, though, between Maypole just working and Maypole
247 working well, and if you want to optimize your application, then you
248 need to start putting in the code to do that. The beauty of Maypole is
249 that you can do as much or as little of such optimization as you want
250 or need.
251 So now we can view users and their photos. It's time to allow the users
253 to edit their profiles and upload a new photo.
254 Editing user profiles
256 I introduced Flox to a bunch of friends and told them to be as ruthless
257 as possible in finding bugs and trying to break it. And break it they
258 did; within an hour the screens were thoroughly messed up as users had
259 nasty HTML tags in their profiles, names, email addresses and so on.
260 This spawned another hack in the request cookbook: "Limiting data for
261 display". I changed the untaint columns to use "html" untainting, and
262 all was better:
263 Flox::User->untaint_columns(
265 html => [qw/first_name last_name profile/],
266 printable => [qw/password/],
267 integer => [qw/affiliation unistatus /],
268 email => [qw/email/]
269 );
270 The next stage was the ability to upload a photo. We unleash the
272 "Uploading files" recipe, with an additional check to make sure the
273 photo is of a sensible size:
274 use constant MAX_IMAGE_SIZE => 512 * 1024;
276 sub do_upload :Exported {
277 my ($class, $r) = @_;
278 my $user = $r->user;
279 my $upload = $r->ar->upload("picture");
280 if ($upload) {
281 my $ct = $upload->info("Content-type");
282 return $r->error("Unknown image file type $ct")
283 if $ct !~ m{image/(jpeg|gif|png)};
284 return $r->error("File too big! Maximum size is ".MAX_IMAGE_SIZE)
285 if $upload->size > MAX_IMAGE_SIZE;
286 my $fh = $upload->fh;
288 my $image = do { local $/; <$fh> };
289 use Image::Size;
291 my ($x, $y) = imgsize(\$image);
292 return $r->error("Image too big! ($x, $y) Maximum size is 350x350")
293 if $y > 350 or $x > 350;
294 $r->user->photo_type($ct);
295 $r->user->photo($image);
296 }
297 $r->objects([ $user ]);
299 $r->template("view");
300 }
301 Now we've gone as far as we want to go about user editing at the
303 moment. Let's have a look at the real meat of a social networking
304 site: getting other people involved, and registering connections
305 between users.
306 Invitations
308 We need to do two things to make invitations work: first provide a way
309 to issue an invitation, and then provide a way to accept it. Since what
310 we're doing in issuing an invitation is essentially creating a new one,
311 we'll use our usual practice of having a page to display the form to
312 offer an invitation, and then use a "do_edit" method to actually do the
313 work. So our "issue" method is just an empty action:
314 sub issue :Exported {}
316 and the template proceeds as normal:
318 [% PROCESS header %]
320 <h2> Invite a friend </h2>
321 <FORM ACTION="[%base%]/invitation/do_edit/" METHOD="post">
323 <TABLE>
324 Now we use the "Catching errors in a form" recipe from the Request
326 Cookbook and write our form template:
327 <TR><TD>
329 First name: <INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="forename"
330 VALUE="[%request.params.forename%]">
331 </TD>
332 <TD>
333 Last name: <INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="surname"
334 VALUE="[%request.params.surname%]">
335 </TD></TR>
336 [% IF errors.forename OR errors.surname %]
337 <TR>
338 <TD><SPAN class="error">[% errors.forename %]</SPAN> </TD>
339 <TD><SPAN class="error">[% errors.surname %]</SPAN> </TD>
340 </TR>
341 [% END %]
342 <TR>
343 ...
344 Now we need to work on the "do_edit" action. This has to validate the
346 form parameters, create the invited user, create the row in the
347 "invitation" table, and send an email to the new user asking them to
348 join.
349 We'd normally use "create_from_cgi" to do the first two stages, but
351 this time we handle the untainting manually, because there are a
352 surprising number of things we need to check before we actually do the
353 create. So here's the untainting of the parameters:
354 sub do_edit :Exported {
356 my ($self, $r) = @_;
357 my $h = CGI::Untaint->new(%{$r->params});
358 my (%errors, %ex);
359 for (qw( email forename surname )) {
360 $ex{$_} = $h->extract(
361 "-as_".($_ eq "email" ? "email" : "printable") => $_
362 ) or $errors{$_} = $h->error;
363 }
364 Next, we do the usual dance of throwing the user back at the form in
366 case of errors:
367 if (keys %errors) {
369 $r->template_args->{message} =
370 "There was something wrong with that...";
371 $r->template_args->{errors} = \%errors;
372 $r->template("issue");
373 return;
374 }
375 We've introduced a new template variable here, "message", which we'll
377 use to display any important messages to the user.
378 The first check we need to do is whether or not we already have a user
380 with that email address. If we have, and they're a real user, then we
381 abort the invite progress and instead redirect them to viewing that
382 user's profile.
383 my ($user) = Flox::User->search({ email => $ex{email} });
385 if ($user) {
386 if ($user->status eq "real") {
387 $r->template_args->{message} =
388 "That user already seems to exist on Flox. ".
389 "Is this the one you meant?";
390 $self->redirect_to_user($r, $user);
392 }
393 Where "redirect_to_user" looks like this:
395 sub redirect_to_user {
397 my ($self, $r, $user) = @_;
398 $r->objects([ $user ]);
399 $r->template("view");
400 $r->model_class("Flox::User"); # Naughty.
401 }
402 This is, as the comment quite rightly points out, naughty. We're
404 currently doing a "/invitation/do_edit/" and we want to turn this into
405 a "/user/view/xxx", changing the table, template and arguments all at
406 once. To do this, we have to change the Maypole request object's idea
407 of the model class, since this determines where to look for the
408 template: if we didn't, we'd end up with "invitation/view" instead of
409 "user/view".
410 Ideally, we'd do this with a Apache redirect, but we want to get that
412 "message" in there as well, so this will have to do. This isn't good
413 practice; we put it into a subroutine so that we can fix it up if we
414 find a better way to do it.
415 Anyway back in the "do_edit" action, this is what we should do if a
417 user already exists on the system and has accepted an invite already.
418 What if we're trying to invite a user but someone else has invited them
419 first and they haven't replied yet?
420 } else {
422 # Put it back to the form
423 $r->template_args->{message} =
424 "That user has already been invited; " .
425 "please wait for them to accept";
426 $r->template("issue");
427 }
428 return;
429 }
430 Race conditions suck.
432 Okay. Now we know that the user doesn't exist, and so can create the
434 new one:
435 my $new_user = Flox::User->create({
437 email => $ex{email},
438 first_name => $ex{forename},
439 last_name => $ex{surname},
440 status => "invitee"
441 });
442 We want to give the invitee a URL that they can go to in order to
444 accept the invite. Now we don't just want the IDs of our invites to be
445 sequential, since someone could get one invite, and then guess the rest
446 of the invite codes. We provide a relatively secure MD5 hash as the
447 invite ID:
448 my $random = md5_hex(time.(0+{}).$$.rand);
450 For additional security, we're going to have the URL in the form
452 "/invitation/accept/id/from_id/to_id", encoding the user ids of the two
453 users. Now we can send email to the invitee to ask them to visit that
454 URL:
455 my $newid = $new_user->id;
457 my $myid = $r->user->id;
458 _send_mail(to => $ex{email},
459 url => "$random/$myid/$newid",
460 user => $r->user);
461 I'm not going to show the "_send_mail" routine, since it's boring. We
463 haven't actually created the "Invitation" object yet, so let's do that
464 now.
465 Flox::Invitation->create({
467 id => $random,
468 issuer => $r->user,
469 recipient => $new_user,
470 expires => Time::Piece->new(time + LIFETIME)->datetime
471 });
472 You can also imagine a daily cron job that cleans up the "Invitation"
474 table looking for invitations that ever got replied to within their
475 lifetime:
476 ($_->expires > localtime && $_->delete)
478 for Flox::Invitation->retrieve_all;
479 Notice that we don't check whether the ID is already used. We could,
481 but, you know, if MD5 sums start colliding, we have much bigger
482 problems on our hands.
483 Anyway, now we've got the invitation created, we can go back to whence
485 we came: viewing the original user:
486 $self->redirect_to_user($r, $r->user);
488 Now our invitee has an email, and goes click on the URL. What happens?
490 XXX
492 Friendship Connections
494 XXX
495 Links
497 The source for Flox is available at
498 <http://cvs.simon-cozens.org/viewcvs.cgi/flox>.
499 Contents, Next The Maypole iBuySpy Portal, Previous Maypole Request
501 Hacking Cookbook
502perl v5.38.0 2023-07-20 Maypole::Manual::Flox(3)