Flipper: Retrieve a List of Features for an Actor

Image from Ranae Smith from Unsplash

When your frontend is a SPA, dealing with feature toggles can be confusing. The challenge is making sure the frontend can access and control these toggles without making things too complicated.

Let’s say you want to use Flipper to centralize your feature toggles. You could use the backend or Flipper UI as a sort of control center. Your aim? To effortlessly display all available feature toggles for a specific user. You might decide to showcase these toggles on a user’s profile, reachable through an endpoint like /profile.

In this guide, we’ll dig into this scenario, explaining how Flipper acts as the bridge between your frontend and backend. By the end, you’ll know how to use Flipper to take charge of your feature toggles, making your application more adaptable and user-friendly. Let’s make managing feature toggles easy with Flipper!

The profile endpoint

def profile
	render json: current_user
end

{
  "name": "Foo",
  "email": "foo@example.com",
  ...
}

Retrieve a list of features by actor

Flipper.features.inject({}) do |hash, feature|
  hash[feature.key] = featuer.enabled? ACTOR
  hash
end

In this code, ensure that you replace **ACTOR** with the appropriate user or actor identifier in your application. Additionally, consider adding comments for clarity in the code.

def profile
	render json: current_user_with_features
end

private

def current_user_with_features
	current_user.merge({ features: user_features })
end

def user_features
	Flipper.features.inject({}) do |hash, feature|
	  hash[feature.key] = feature.enabled? current_user
    hash
  end
end

Output

{
  "name": "Foo",
  "email": "foo@example.com",
  "features": {
    "ft_document_upload": true,
    "ft_bulk_export": false,
    ...
  }
}