--- title: UI for our Twitter Bookmarks with Rails slug: ui-for-our-twitter-bookmarks-with-rails published_at: 2022-07-08 12:00:35 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:13:30 +0000 summary: description: In this episode, we'll build a simple UI for our Twitter bookmarks manager. We'll use Tailwind UI and handle some interesting data structure reorganization. Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/bookmarks-search-rails #rails #rubyonrails tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, bookmarks, twitter api, twitter api v2, twitter bookmarks] views: 431 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/ui-for-our-twitter-bookmarks-with-rails youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMhs6TIJuOw youtube_id: kMhs6TIJuOw embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/kMhs6TIJuOw thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/kMhs6TIJuOw/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # UI for our Twitter Bookmarks with Rails *Published: July 08, 2022* *Views: 431* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMhs6TIJuOw) [![UI for our Twitter Bookmarks with Rails](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/kMhs6TIJuOw/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMhs6TIJuOw) ## Description In this episode, we'll build a simple UI for our Twitter bookmarks manager. We'll use Tailwind UI and handle some interesting data structure reorganization. Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/bookmarks-search-rails #rails #rubyonrails ## Transcript what's up welcome back we are building out a bookmark tool for interacting with the twitter v2 api we're building this with ruby on rails in uh we've already covered how we authenticate with twitter we built a little twitter client to interact with the api and in this episode we're going to go through and build out a ui that's going to show us all of our bookmarks and if we have time we'll also build out some smart folders based on these context annotations so right now we're just kind of dumping all the json on the page but what we want to do is like actually iterate over these bookmarks and have them show up we also want to clean this up we're using tailwind today so let's actually first jump into application html erb and what i want to do is just give this some breathing room and i've been using tailwind ui a ton i know it's a crutch before this i use bootstrap whatever don't judge it makes it look so nice and uh it's just so simple all right so what we're going to do is we're going to look at some page layouts here what i really want is just like some spacing layouts um so we have oh gosh i really just care about the spacing there we go layout containers so i want a container and i want it to be narrow so that it kind of looks a little bit like um twitter i'm just going to grab that and then drop that into my application html erb which is the template so i'm going to say yield here that's where our content is going now if we head back we'll notice that it's already sort of changed the page and our stuff is at least showing up a little bit closer to the middle so let's go to our bookmarks uh index.html we're going to use class text large and font bold for our bookmark header and what else do we want to do i guess we want to iterate over all these bookmarks so right now you'll notice that if you look at the json right at the top we have data so there's an object that has the key data that points at an array and closer to the bottom this is where data ends and there's another key includes that points at an object that includes users and some other things so what i want to do is actually go to my bookmarks controller and pull out the bookmarks from just that data blob so here i'm going to say something like i don't know um like bookmark uh bookmarks is client.book marks and then i'm gonna say my bookmarks are actually like this bookmarks data and what that'll let me do is go back to my index page and iterate over some bookmarks so i'm going to say something like at bookmarks.each do mark and now i can say let's print out that mark if we remove our pre-tag for just a second and come back here and refresh the page now we're printing out just the raw sort of hashes for the bookmarks we see the author id we see the context annotations and more print it out but it's kind of hard to read so let's do let's add just like some brs in here so we can get a little bit more um make it a little bit easier to tell what's actually being spit out so that is like the bookmark there has the author id the created at and some text so i think what we want to do is i want to actually just grab some section from tailwind ui that's going to give us like a little blob um i don't know some sort of like thing that's going to spit out some some media objects yeah media object that seems good okay maybe it looks like wide responsive basic responsive media right stretch to fit align to bottom align to center basic um i think maybe we can just go with the basic one okay so we're going to drop that in as like what we show for each of the marks we don't need an svg but what in what we're going to do instead is use an image tag with the source being the author's um the author's profile image url so where do we get that the alt is going to be something like the author name um photo or maybe like a photo of that person a photo of so and so um okay so in order to get out the author when we were looking back at the raw text here we don't actually see the author we just see the author id so if we look at mark right now the mark has the maybe we do mark.keys the mark has the id context annotation text and author id but it doesn't have anything about the author so um instead what we want to do is back in our bookmarks controller we want to pull out the authors from bookmarks also so we want to say something like authors is a dictionary in fact like let me show you what i uh what i'm looking at here so if we say underscore bookmarks um includes that's going to give us back a list of the author or the list of the users right so includes users that is a an array and inside of that array is a bunch of objects where it has the name the id username etc what i want to do is to make it a a constant time lookup of the author i want to create a mapping of the author id to the author object so the way that it stands right now if i just had the id and i needed to look up an author i would need to iterate over all of the objects in this array or in this list and that would be sort of like a linear time lookup in order to find the author so to make it a little bit faster i'm going to reorganize the data structure into a hash where this is going to be like the id of the author points at the author data okay so the way we're going to get that is say bookmarks includes users.each do user and we're going to say at authors for user at id is equal to user i think this is going to give us what we want so we can do this binding dot pry trick again refresh the page and we should now see at authors being a dictionary of author id points at and then the object so that's pretty handy because now when we go back into our view for the bookmarks index here at the very top of our loop or inside of our block for each of our bookmarks we can create a new variable called author and this is going to be something like at authors at mark of author id and that will create this local variable author that we can then use to do other stuff oh my gosh look at that holy moly so it's already got the author's image url and some lorem ipsum for a second i was like whoa that works so fast because it kind of looks like the thing that we had in the very beginning right um okay so let's see here so we've got we've got the author's image url is it does it have the right alt text let's take a look it looks like a photo of trixie mattel so that is indeed the right alt text that we were hoping for so that's cool all right so now what i want to do is put the author's name underneath it we'll put their handle we'll put the text of the the mark so let's put this let's make this the author's uh name we'll make another uh span class i don't know what's going to be in there uh author like i think it's their username or something and then here we're going to put out the mark text and when we refresh the page all right so now we see their handle that's cool we also see the text this is their name all right that's pretty sweet for the author username though i want to make this i actually want to make this a link to their profile on twitter so we're going to say something like a the href is going to be twitter.com and then the author username i believe that should work in most cases and then here we'll just put an at sign before it so that it looks twittery and we probably want this to have the class of like underline so that it looks like a link all right now if we click on it we're brought to their page we probably also want to do like the um that whole thing where we don't uh let's see target there's like a whole bunch of best practices here around not having uh followers and whatever like no rel no follow et cetera et cetera but this is a good start okay so we have all these brs that's not really a great practice for keeping things organized so instead we're going to use twitter bootstrap or not twitter we're going to use the the built-in tools from tailwind ui so we're going to say like i don't know p t 8 or something so we get some padding top above each of these and then let's make bookmarks even larger like 3 xl and we really want that to be bold and huge and now we have sort of all of our bookmarks here coming out they look really pretty good i think the one thing i might change is i want these images that are to the left to look nice like the avatars um inside of this you know tailwind ui i keep wanting to say twitter ui okay so image class this is what we're going to drop on the image is class is this thing and now how does it look boom it looks beautiful okay i guess like the one other thing that i wanted to do was know when this thing happened when this tweet happened so right below the text we'll add a span class of like text small and we're going to print out the mark created at so this is like when the bookmark was created if we refresh the page we see this timestamp which kind of looks nasty there is this really nice helper called time ago in words and the first time i saw this my mind was sort of blown so if you refresh the page here you will see i don't know why it sometimes fails but yeah now it says about 17 hours and so that's when it was a go so let's see now we have about 17 hours ago super cool i guess we want to make this a little bit muted too 400 okay nice so that's now that's like nice and muted i guess we can maybe make this the handle blue or something i don't know this gives us a pretty good breakdown okay so now we are uh we're rendering a ui that contains our bookmarks so that's fantastic all right we are looking good let's move on to the next section where we're going to like build out some folders which are going to be smart folders based on the like the context or those like context annotations for each of the bookmarks so we want to build some smart folders that are about our bookmarks let's also give this a little bit of breathing room we'll just give this a p t 8 also and our our book our folders are going to go in between bookmarks and trixie mattel or like our first bookmarked tweet here and the bookmarks are gonna look or i'm sorry the folders are gonna look something like um just maybe like pills or something that you can click on and the way we're gonna build those is um we need to kind of like map over and then filter down to a collection of these um of these folders so back inside of bookmarks controller uh let's see so binding.pry let's actually come down here and refresh the page so app bookmarks so each of the bookmarks might have this context annotation so bookmarks.first has a context annotation so context annotation looks like this context annotation so it's plural okay so it has several so this is an array and the array has a each each context annotation is an object that has a domain and an entity and so this specific bookmark has two context annotations one is uh person trixie mattel and the other is entertainment personality trixie mattel so um what i think we want to do is iterate over the context annotations and build a mapping of like the combination so this is this is from the from the demo they have kind of a breakdown here where they show context notations if you if you read through the code the way that they set this up is they build out the context annotations into a mapping of the folder id goes to kind of like it's a it's uses the id from the domain and the id from the entity um so yeah so here they're they're creating these contexts of like the id of the domain and the id of the entity and then they're using those to sort of filter down some of the tweets in the future so we're going to do something very similar so over inside of our bookmarks controller here what we want to do is we're going to we're going to create these folders so folders are going to be a a dictionary again and this is going to be of like domain id colon con um what is oh entity id points at and then like entity.name something like this okay so how do we how do we actually get that out all right so what we're going to do is we're going to build this up based on the bookmark data so we're going to iterate over the bookmarks bookmarks.each do mark and for each bookmark it might have context annotation so mark at context annotations and when i say it might uh it's possible that this key is missing so it's possible that there's a bookmark with no context annotations i found that there's a few tweets where there was just nothing added to them in which case we want to use dot fetch so that we can use a sensible default because we want to call each and iterate over each of these context annotations i'm just going to name the variable ca i know it's too short but whatever just go with me so in order to build our folder so we're gonna say at folders at some like i don't know let's make a helper method here to get like the key or like context annotation key for ca so we'll make a method down here private method and this is going to return ca at domain id and i guess this is going to be a string of these things concatenated ca at entity id so this kind of just follows the demo pattern i'm not sure if this is like exactly how i would build it out long term but um gives us something to work with okay and then we're going to set that equal to ca entity name so if we look back at sort of our crash thing here the entity name is going to be in this case the entity name would be trixie mattel in this case it would also be trixie mattel they're going to have different domains but i guess like technically we could have the the name be like the concatenation of the two let's actually let's yeah let's do that so we're gonna have like the uh the domain we'll make the domain first ca domain name and then the entity name and maybe we'll have like a dash between them i don't know let's see what happens here okay we lost our let's see uh binding.prime let's just see if folders looks like what we expect and okay so we have our key which is the enti or the domain with the entity and then that gives us person dash trixie mattel entertainment personality trixie mattel and then we have entities entity service technology interests and hobbies category computer programming maybe we don't want maybe we don't want the domain in the name so let's let's just remove the domain name let's remove the domain from the name and we'll just use the entity name just it's it's a little bit cleaner and it'll be shorter in the ui okay we'll go back to our bookmarks index and now we can iterate over folders so at folders.each do and this is going to give us like some id and then the like name or something of the entity so for now let's just print those out name and if we refresh we i was expecting to see some names printed out here at folders.each do name uh folders does that give us anything okay oh you know what yeah this should give us the key in value id and name oh it is it's working down here i don't know why it didn't work when i refreshed okay all right so now we have these names printed out let's make these links so the way the links are gonna work is we're gonna have have a we're going to allow the bookmarks page to accept a query string parameter and use that to filter the bookmarks so here we'll say something like this is going to be in href with bookmarks question mark folder is equal to the id and that should give us a bunch of links and they are links we just can't see them because by default talent doesn't make them underline all right so now if we click on technology now at the top you'll notice that we have folder and then it has sort of the id of the domain and the id of the entity so we can then use that to filter down but let's make this look a little bit cleaner so we can go back over to tailwind ui search for badges and the badges i don't know these ones look pretty nice let's look at the i don't know i like the green one we could probably make it so that like whatever the current folder is is like a certain color or whatever i don't know um whatever for now let's just see how this looks oh gosh that looks so cool but i think green is too much let's try gray um all right and then text gray oh that looks so cool okay so if we click on stripe it should only show us oh right now we have to implement that so we have to implement the filtering based on the folder that was selected we're going to go back to our bookmarks controller and here at the bottom we want to say something like bookmarks is bookmarks dot filter or select mark i think they're gonna yeah filter and select i think are aliases for each other and here what we wanna do is we wanna say something like mark dot fetch context annotations dot any so if any context annotation matches the folder key so if params folder so only if there's a folder query string variable do we want to filter down and we're going to filter down by saying any of the annotations match the key or like context annotation key for ca is equal to params folder all right so okay now it's filtering down so if we look at show me the bookmarks about meals or show me the bookmarks about government education show me the bookmarks about i think it's the same one yeah enterprise software all right trixie mattel sweet okay so we have built out a tool uh i guess i also want like a little bit more space under uh bookmarks here so let's go back to our um i guess yeah i could probably wrap this whole thing in a div just to give it it's kind of its own little component so we'll say i don't know p t 8 again keep it all consistent nice all right i like it i like it okay yeah so now we have like a fully working app using the twitter v2 api for filtering our bookmarks using the context annotations from twitter thanks so much for watching really appreciate your time and attention hopefully this was useful this was kind of a fun little exercise in munching the data that we get back from the twitter api in the next episode uh we'll throw a payment front end on this we always got to have payments right so let's add a little payments front end for anyone who's logged in we're going to use stripe to collect payment for our brand new bookmarks software as a service and we'll allow people to buy it for i don't know some amount per month and then we'll have some billing management etc etc but now people can sign up and they can manage their bookmarks so excited excited that we made it this far thanks again and we'll see you in the next one [Music] --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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