I'm a bit late mentioning this, but I released another super-beta gem in the hopes it might help another poor soul: treeoid, the missing "acts_as_tree" library for mongoid. It couldn't be simpler, really: it gives you a "parent" accessor and a "children" collection. On top of that, it provides a scope allowing you to list a set of treeoid objects in hierarchical order, which is perfect for front end integration.
The tests are there but nominal; I'd love to see them fleshed out. I also had some ideas for making it cooler; for example, I keep an array of an object's descendants in the object, allowing me to hierarchically order objects. This opens up some novel means to simplify how I implement the parent and children accessor. Imagine this:
field :ancestry, type => Array # contains ids of all ancestors including self, already exists
# but instead of a parent_id accessor
def parent_id
ancestry.at(-2) # the parent can be fetched from the ancestry list
end
This also allows all descendants of a given object to be easily fetched - if the id shows up in the ancestry, return it! It's this kind of out-of-the-box thinking that has really endeared MongoDB to me. I hope you can benefit from this and help me improve it. Or help with greedy. I'd love to get said help at CVREG's upcoming Why Day hackfest.
