I'm building a Rails 3.1 application that allows people to submit events. One of the fields for the event is a venue. On the create/edit form, the venue_name field has autocomplete functionality so it displays venues with a similar name, but the user is able to enter any name.
When the form is submitted, I'm using find_or_create_by_name when attaching the venue to the event model.
I'm doing this because it's not possible for us to maintain a complete list of venues and I don't want to prevent people from submitting an event because the venue isn't in the list.
The problem is that it's quite likely we'll get duplicates over time like "Venue Name" and "The Venue Name" or any number of other possibilities.
I was thinking that I probably just need to create an administrative tool that allows the admin to review recent venues and if he/she thinks they're duplicates to search/select a master record and have the duplicate record's association copied over to the master record and once successful to delete the duplicate record.
Is this a good approach? In terms of the data manipulation would it be best to handle this in a transaction? Would it be best to add this functionality in a sort of utility class - or directly in the Venue model?
Thanks for your time.
If I were going to put together a system like that, I'd probably try to find a unique identifier I could associate with each venue - perhaps an address or a phone number?
So, if I had "The Clubhouse" with a phone number 503-555-1212, and someone tried to input a new venue called "Clubhouse" with the phone number 503-555-1212, I might take them to an interstitial page where I ask them "Did you mean this location?"
Barring that, I might ask for a phone number or address first, then present a list of possible matches with the option to create a new venue.
Otherwise, you're introducing a lot of potential for error at the admin level, plus you run into a scalability problem. If your admin has to review 10 entries a month, maybe not so bad - but if your app takes off and that number goes to 1000, that becomes unmanageable fast!
Related
I have a question for a project I am working on. I am working on a RoR project in which a site is selling a single type of item, a book. The person I am creating this for does not want to deal with users creating user account to check out as the sales season is very short for this product, the purchases are done once per year, and the site only sells a single item.
I am wondering if there is something wrong with the implementation I am thinking of. What I was envisioning was a single database class called Orders. visitors to the site would simple fill out an order form with payment details through stripe and click submit. If they payment clears, the order with all the Orders information would be persisted to the DB. If the payment fails then it is not persisted and the relevant error information is displayed in using flash.
I suppose the meat of my question is; is there anything inherently 'wrong' about implementing this model without a users class and just having visitors to the site place orders?
I am a fairly new developer and this is my first big project so any feedback is appreciated!
If your requirements say that it is okay, then it is okay, if your requirements say it is not okay, then it is not okay.
There's not more to say, since only you know what your requirements are.
I am using three models:
- users
- events
- user_events (the join table)
I feel like I do not need to save every search result because it would be unnecessary. The search will query two APIs and display maybe the top 10 results and display them to the user. The user then might be interested in one or two of these events and add them to a list of things that interest them, a bookmark, if you may. Bookmarks that are happening on the same day should then be grouped together for the users organizational purposes.
Should I make another search model along with a search controller? I'm fairly new to Rails and need some advice on this topic.
I would advise you make a bookmark or search class to store a search when a user wants to save it. Then you can construct a has_many relationship between a user and a bookmark. So a user will have many bookmarks. See this for more documentation: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html#the-has-many-association
I'd like to display a message to each user the first time they log in after a deployment, which describes the changes. I have some ideas about rolling my own. For example, I could maintain a table of messages and another which tracks which users have seen which. But it seems like a common-enough use case that I'm surprise I can't find a gem which does this.
Thanks!
You could create a table of messages that have a publish_date column. If you maintain a last_logged_in column on a record for a user, you can get all the messages created since that person logged in last and display them.
I'm have application that allows users to store food diary entries of approximately 140 characters in length. I am looking for a solution that will allow me to tie content modules (think tips for healthy eating) to the user's diary entries based on keywords in the entry similar to what Google does with adwords. Are there any out-of-the-box solutions that can do that in Rails?
Here are the specific requirements:
User logs food diary entry
In the user's food diary, if there's a specific tip that matches a keyword for the entry, then the tip is displayed next to the entry
Tips would be defined through an admin tool where the admin specifies the tip content and keywords that would make it appear in the diary
Trying to figure out a) if there's a pre-build solution I could use for something like this or b) what the best approach would be for performance since the users's food diary might have 20 entries per page, and each entry would have to be evaluated to see if there are any corresponding tips that match entry keywords.
For designing a home-grown solution, one idea I had was to make the tip associations when a new food entry is stored like this:
user adds a food entry
after_save a callback method breaks apart the entry into keywords and searches the tips model for matches
if there's a match, it's stored in an association table when new entries are created rather then when the user's food diary is rendered in the web page.
There's a performance hit on storing new entries, but it might allow the user's diary to load faster then doing all those look-ups when the diary is rendered.
Does that make sense, or is there a better way? better yet, are there tools that can accomplish what I'm trying to do?
Thanks!
This is not an AdWords API question, but I'll take a shot:
I would move the association table building into an offline task / cronjob. That would take care of the performance overhead when creating new entries, and users would be generally okay with a message like "Tips are being generated, please be patient" if they happen to view the topic too soon.
I'm not aware of any existing solutions, but this sounds like a hashtag system to me. Basically you have two lists (food dairy entries, tips), you want to assign hashtags to both lists and then pair entries with same hashtags. Googling for a hashtag system / library might be a good starting point.
Cheers,
Anash
I am developing a gallery which allows users to post photos, comments, vote and do many other tasks.
Now I think that it is correct to allow users to unsubscribe and remove all their data if they want to. However it is difficult to allow such a thing because you run the risk to break your application (e.g. what should I do when a comment has many replies? what should I do with pages that have many revisions by different users?).
Photos can be easily removed, but for other data (i.e. comments, revisions...) I thought that there are three possibilities:
assign it to the admin
assign it to a user called "removed-user"
mantain the current associations (i.e. the user ID) and only rename user's data (e.g. assign a new username such as "removed-user-24" and a non-existent e-mail such as "noreply-removed-user-24#mysite.com"
What are the best practices to follow when we allow users to remove their accounts? How do you implement them (particularly in Rails)?
I've typically solved this type of problem by having an active flag on user, and simply setting active to false when the user is deleted. That way I maintain referential integrity throughout the system even if a user is "deleted". In the business layer I always validate a user is active before allowing them to perform operations. I also filter inactive users when retrieving data.
The usual thing to do is instead of deleting them from a database, add a boolean flag field and have it be true for valid users and false for invalid users. You will have to add code to filter on the flag. You should also remove all relevant data from the user that you can. The primary purpose of this flag is to keep the links intact. It is a variant of the renaming the user's data, but the flag will be easier to check.
Ideally in a system you would not want to "hard delete" data. The best way I know of and that we have implemented in past is "soft delete". Maintain a status column in all your data tables which ideally refers to the fact whether the row is active or not. Any row when created is "Active" by default; however as entries are deleted; they are made inactive.
All select queries which display data on screen filter results for only "active records". This way you get following advantages:
1. Data Recovery is possible.
2. You can have a scheduled task on database level, which can take care of hard deletes of once in a way; if really needed. (Like a SQL procedure or something)
3. You can have an admin screen to be able to decide which accounts, entries etc you'd really want to mark for deletion
4. A temperory disabling of account can also be implemented with same solution.
In prod environments where I have worked on, a hard delete is a strict No-No. Infact audits are maintained for deletes also. But if application is really small; it'd be upto user.
I would still suggest a "virtual delete" or a "soft delete" with periodic cleanup on db level; which will be faster efficient and optimized way of cleaning up.
I generally don't like to delete anything and instead opt to mark records as deleted/unpublished using states (with AASM i.e. acts as state machine).
I prefer states and events to just using flags as you can use events to update attributes and send emails etc. in one foul swoop. Then check states to decide what to do later on.
HTH.
I would recommend putting in a delete date field that contains the date/time the user unsubscribed - not only to the user record, but to all information related to that user. The app should check the field prior to displaying anything. You can then run a hard delete for all records 30 days (your choice of time) after the delete date. This will allow the information not to be shown (you will probably need to update the app in a few places), time to allow the user to re-subscribe (accidental or rethinking) and a scheduled process to delete old data. I would remove ALL information about the member and any related comments about the member or their prior published data (photos, etc.)
I am sure it changing lot since update with Data Protection and GDPR, etc.
the reason I found this page as I was looking for advice because of new Apply policy on account deletion requirements extended https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=i71db0mv
We are using Ruby on Rails right now. Your answers seem a little outdated? or not or still useful right now
I was thinking something like that
create a new table “old_user_table” with old user_id , First name, Second name, email, and booking slug.
It will allow keep all users who did previous booking. And deleted their user ID in the app. We need to keep all records for booking for audit purpose in the last 5 years in the app.
the user setup with this app, the user but never booking, then the user will not transfer to “old_user_table” cos the user never booking.
Does it make sense? something like that?