Kasey - A Simple Case (Kase) Management Engine

Many apps are case management apps. Often, the choice is 'build a simple case management tool' to bloat your own application, or connect with an existing SaaS case management tool via some API.

In the first situation, every line of code is a liability, and the case management portion may not even be cohesive with the application you're building. In the second case, money money money.

Kasey (a kase management plugin for Rails) provides a simple case management workflow engine for inclusion in your new or existing Rails application.

Installation

This gem uses (and includes) ActiveStorage, ActionMailbox, and ActionText. You may or may not have set these up in your application. If not, you can find the instructions as follows:

• Active Storage
• Action Text
• Action Mailbox

Once these are all installed, you'll want to add the gem to your Gemfile. If you're just using the gem, add:

$> gem 'kasey' # this doesn't work yet

or

$> gem 'kasey', git: 'https://github.com/beflagrant/kasey', branch: 'main'

If you're working on Kasey, add kasey as a git submodule:

$> git submodule add [email protected]:beflagrant/kasey vendor/kasey`
$> git submodule update --init

You'll likely also want to commit the .gitmodules file, unless the previous exercise made you happy.

You'll also need to add kasey to with a path:

gem 'kasey', path: 'vendor/kasey'

If you're using the webpacker gem, update to version 5.2:

gem 'webpacker', '~> 5.2'

Once the gem is in your Gemfile:

$ bundle
$ rails kasey:setup

Add Kasey to your Routes

Let your application know where to mount Kasey's routes by adding the following to your config/routes.rb file:

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  # other routes before or after
  mount Kasey::Engine, at: '/kasey'
end

Konfigure Kasey

After running rails kasey:install, you will have an initializer in config/initializers/kasey.rb. Update this file with your app's configuration.

TBD!

Intakes

Kasey keeps track of communication with someone submitting an intake. An intake is a collection of data submitted to your application. This could be an office sign-in sheet, a real estate query, or a simple contact form. Kasey doesn't care what it is, as long as it has at least one field called email.

In order for Kasey to track an intake object, you should add the kase_managed directive to the object, for example:

class Contact < ApplicationRecord
  kase_managed

  validates_presence_of :name, :email, :message, :deadline
end

When a new intake is created, a Kasey::Kase will be created to manage it.

Customizing Intakes

When you view a Kase, the Intake's data will also be displayed by default. This will simply be the attribute data on the model. You can, however, display the data however you want by creating a Kasey partial inside of your application's views directory. In views/, create a kasey directory. Then for each kind of intake in your system, create a partial to display it however you like. For example, to customize the in-Kase display of the Contact above, we would create the file:

app/views/kasey/contacts/_contact.html.erb

We could the populate it however we liked:

<div class="content">
  <p>Name: <%= contact.name %></p>
  <p>Email: <%= contact.email %></p>
  <p>Message: <%= contact.message %></p>
  <p>Deadline <%= contact.deadline %></p>
</div>

This partial would be rendered at the head of the

Development

Testing

Contributing

Contribution directions go here.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.