Working with reactions

A reaction is very short response, often just an emoji, on a comment.

##Creating a reaction

To create a reaction, call the reaction method on the comment.

$post->comment('Everybody pulled their socks up');

$comment->react('😍');

Behind the scenes, a Spatie\Comments\Reaction will be store that is associated with the comment and the currently logged in user.

To create a reaction for another user, you can pass that user as a second argument.

$anotherUser = User::whereFirst('email', 'john@beatles.com');

$comment->react('😍', $anotherUser);

A single user may have multiple reactions on a comment, but each reaction will be unique.

$post->comment('Everybody pulled their socks up');

$comment
    ->react('😍')
    ->react('👍')
    ->react('👍') // will not be stored as 👍 was already added as a reaction by the current user;

##Retrieving reactions

You can retrieve all reactions by using the reactions relation on a comment.

$comment->reactions;

The reactions will be returned in a Spatie\Comments\Models\Collections\ReactionCollection. That collection has a summary method that will return a summary of all reactions.

$summary = $comment->reactions->summary() // returns a Illuminate\Support\Collection;

The $summary will contain an item per unique reaction. Each item in $summary has these keys:

• reaction: the reaction itself, e.g. 😍
• count: the number of users that gave this reaction on the comment
• commentator_reacted: a boolean that indicates whatever the currently logged in user gave this reaction

You can pass a User model to the summary method. The commentator_reacted in the return collection will be true when the given user has given that particular reaction.

##Deleting a reaction

To delete a particular reaction on a comment, you can call deleteReaction.

$comment->deleteReaction('😍');

The code above will delete the existing 😍 reaction on that $comment for the logged in user. If that reaction did not exist, nothing will happen.

To delete a reaction for another user, pass that user as second argument to deleteReaction.

$comment->deleteReaction('😍', $anotherUser);