I have a rails application running in which people can enter timesheets, get reports, ...: www.temponia.com
Now I would like to create a demo environment where users can experiment without the need of having to register.
I already found the gems faker and forgery to generate demo data. But my question is: when a user starts the demo environment, should I generate the data and write the data to the database? I don't want all users to share the same demo environment since one user can completely destroy the experience for other testers...
When I write it to the database, and delete it after a couple of days, aren't I running the risk that some tables will get really high identity values really quick? I would generate for example several thousand timesheet entries to make it look realistic...
Are there any other ways to solve this?
In my opinion, you should let the users do what they want to do, to show the completeness of the application, and let everyone share the same environment.
To repopulate your application, you can add some task every X minutes (depends of frequentation), to automatically insert data when it reaches a minimum threshold. See for example whenever gem to add commands in crontab.
https://github.com/javan/whenever
Related
Is it possible to access to the information being saved into a rails log file without reading the log file. To be clear I do not want to send the log file as a batch process but rather every event that is written into the log file I want to also send as a background job to a separate database.
I have multiple apps running in docker containers and wish to save the log entries of each into a shared telemetry database running on the server. Currently the logs are formatted with lograge but I have not figured out how to access this information directly and send it to a background job to be processed.(as stated before I would like direct access to the data being written to the log and send that via a background job)
I am aware of the command Rails.logger.instance_variable_get(:#logger) however what I am looking for is the actual data being saved to the logs so I can ship it to a database.
The reasoning behind this is that there are multiple rails api's running in docker containers. I have an after action set up to run a background job that I hoped would send just the individual log entry but this is where I am stuck. Sizing isn't an issue as the data stored in this database to be purged every 2 weeks. This is moreso a tool for the in-house devs to track telemetry through a dashboard. I appreciate you taking the time to respond
You would probably have to go through your app code and manually save the output from the logger into a table/field in your database inline. Theoretically, any data that ends up in your log should be accessible from within your app.
Depending on what how much data you're planning on saving this may not be the best idea as it has the potential to grow your database extremely quickly (it's not uncommon for apps to create GBs worth of logs in a single day).
You could write a background job that opens the log files, searches for data, and saves it to your database, but the configuration required for that will depend largely on your hosting setup.
So I got a solution working and in fairness it wasn't as difficult as I had thought. As I was using the lograge gem for formatting the logs I created a custom formatter through the guide in this Link.
As I wanted the Son format I just copied this format but was able to put in the call for a background job at this point and also cleanse some data I did not want.
module Lograge
module Formatters
class SomeService < Lograge::Formatters::Json
def call(data)
data = data.delete_if do |k|
[:format, :view, :db].include? k
end
::JSON.dump(data)
# faktory job to ship data
LogSenderJob.perform_async(data)
super
end
end
end
end
This was just one solution to the problem that was made easier as I was able to get the data formatted via lograge but another solution was to create a custom logger and in there I could tell it to write to a database if necessary.
I have a web application with Rails 4 where you have to log in to use it. Now I want a demo version of this app. By demo version I mean a version that has all the features of the original app but without the login. And all the demo data should (and can easyliy) be deleted from time to time (either automatically or manually).
With the original app up and running I want to implement the demo version with the least effort. Ideally I can use most of the original code without any changes. But changes to the original code on the other hand will be available in the demo version without any extra work.
My first idea was to implement the demo version just in the cache/session so if the session is expired, the data is deleteded as well. I canceled that idea due to the deep integration of ActiveRecord in the original app. I would have to re-code all the demo classes and/or build some abstract parent classes and so on.
The second idea was to simply use the original app but to add a flag to each demo account so that they can be distiguished from all the regular ones. I hesitate with this idea because I'm afraid to blow up my database (i.e. the tables that I use for the original app) with demo data leading to lower performance and higher cost/risk of wrong interpretations when evaluating the app data (e.g. how many accounts where created yesterday).
Do you have any ideas how to realize such a demo version in an elegant way?
Smart approaches welcome!
You can have a Guest user account, and a before action in ApplicationController that checks if the current application is in demo mode (specifiable through a custom config) and automatically logs in the user.
You can use a cron job to delete the demo data. Whenever is a good solution for managing cron jobs in ruby.
for automated fake data creating use whenever and faker gems. Faker will generate fake data. Whenever for cron job. And after every demo session it will clear the mock data.
take these point : session, cron, fake seed data
I am quite new at Ruby/Rails. I am building a service that make an API available to users and ends up with some files created in the local filesystem, without any need to connect to any database. Then, once every few hours, I want to run a piece of ruby code that takes these local files, uploads them to Amazon S3 and registers their location into a Postgres database.
Right now both codes live together in the same project. I am observing that every time a user does something the system connects to the database. I have seen this answer which recommends to eliminate all traces of ActiveRecord in my code, but given that I want to have my background bookkeeping process connect to the database I am stuck on what to do.
Is it possible to define two different profiles (one with database and one without) and specify which profile a certain function call should run on? would this work?
I'm a bit confused by this, the db does not magically connect to the database for kicks on every request, it does so because of a specific request requires it. Generally through ActiveRecord but not exclusively
If your system is connecting every time you make a request, then that implies you have some sort of user metric or authorisation based code in there. Just killing off the database will cause this to fail, and likely you'll have to find it anyways, to then get your system to work. I'd advise locating it.
Things to look for are before_filters in controllers, or database session management, for example, or look for what is in the logs - the query should appear - and that will tell you what is being loaded, modified or whatnot.
It might even work to stop your database, just before doing a user activity, and see where the error leads you. Rinse and repeat until the user activity works, without the database.
I am working on an app where the user can log his working hours after he finished his shift. The app is developed in Ruby on Rails 4.I used the scaffold method, so it generated the necessary methods for create, read, update, delete. The fields are hours_worked:number overtime:boolean and date:datetime, for now, I plan to expand it later with more functionality, with user login and some other stuf. The model is empty, I did used the rake db:migrate method. Now I know that you can use the count method, as is shown on the official site for active record. I don't have the idea how to get the total number of hours worked and show it on the index page. Consider that I just started learning Rails. Any suggestions?
Sounds like this is best used with the Timers gem.
https://github.com/celluloid/timers
In your Sessions#new method, you'd want to initialize a variable to keep track of the current time. And then every so often, you'd use one of the methods in the gem to update the current time. You could then subtract the difference.
This is hard to answer without any info on how you are actually logging the info, or seeing any of your code. However if you are just looking for general suggestions you could just save start and stop timestamps and compare them. Or ask the user to input time worked. There are probably a thousand different ways to do this. Please be more specific on what exactly you need help with.
It's quite common in sites- you have a "demo" version with a guest account full of data/posts/comments that you can play with, and all the data is reset every few hours so users wont spam the demo site.
I thought to have another rails environment, "mysite_demo" and use a cron job to call rake to reset it's database every X hours, and populate the seed data.
Then it hit me that all over my app I'll have to check if I'm running in "demo-mode":
For example, if the demo site has a login/register page too, a user might register, insert some data and wonder why his account is deleted after he logged in again.. so demosite shouldn't have a register option at all.
So I thought I'll make a "demo" branch of the code.. with the difference and just merge changes as I go... sounds like an overkill.
ideas?
In my application I started with a fixed demo user with an account that resets every hour. Something about that model didn't quite sit right - if there were multiple users hitting the demo at the same time you could get into some weird concurrency issues. And what if a user is in the middle of a demo and your reset the demo account? What happens?
I don't know if this model works for you but I ended up creating a brand new user account with a demo flag set in the database - I also automatically log the user in. This way the user gets to play around for as long as they like and I don't have to worry about data getting deleted/changed while a user demos my app. I run a cron job every night that deletes users with the demo flag set that are older than 24 hours.
If the demo version is running from its own database, how is it any different from the real thing? The demo site is just an instance of your product.
Just clean up the DB and redeploy the demo as needed. Is it just this simple or am I missing something?
Then it hit me that all over my app I'll have to check if I'm running in "demo-mode" (e.g, you cant register a new user in the demo) and make the site behave accordingly.
If the site is in demo, why does it matter what the users do? Anything they do will be wiped in a few hours, so they won't be able to actually do work with it.
It sounds like you are trying to handicap the site so they will pay. I don't know what your site does, but if its a host based service(web page that stores & display information) then the limited life span of the data should deter squatters.
If you website does something that can be used elsewhere, then I can see limiting it. An example might be a service that transforms media formats, or writes resumes. If the user can do something useful in the 2 hour window and walk away with it, then you might consider branching.
Why not allow the user to make an account even if it is deleted in an hour?
That allows them to see how the registration process of the script works for at least an hour, maybe give a message on the signup page that the account is only valid for an hour.
Just my thoughts
Is there any other functionality that is different in the demo version than the production environment? If it is just an issue of making the user register, you could just create a registered demo account in production, and give out the user name/password for people. Although this may not be an option depending on other business requirements.
If you are willing to use Authlogic you can take a look at this, then every X hours you can look through the database for users that start with anonymous_ and delete records that are associated with them.
Just make a separate demo site that works exactly like the production one, but the DB gets reset once an hour to clean example data. The only change you need to make is a banner across the top of every page that says its a demo. There are several ways to do it, (modify your site theme, or maybe use frames) but basically you should only have to change the code in one place, instead of throughout the site.
You could setup a new environment demo on your database.yml, with read-only privileges for the User table, and an additional demo_database. Then place some checks on your code to see if your RAILS_ENV is on DEMO.
That way, you only need to work with the same codebase and just show whatever you feel like it.
You can deploy it as a separate app with its own database to a separate domain or subdomain and then check the domain to decide what options should be available. For instance if you put it on demo.example.com you would use:
if request.domain =~ /demo/
If you use Capistrano you can set it up to update both apps when you deploy so they are in sync.