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.
Related
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 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
My site lets people create database entries (which most rails apps do), and I realized that there's a huge drop-off from landing on the site to actually signing up to try it. Basically the service lets users build their own document by combining different components. I'm thinking about adding an interface where visitors who are not yet registered can try out the features (building stuff) and ask them to sign up at the last stage, when they're about to publish their document.
First thing that comes to mind is use HTML5 local storage, but then another idea came to mind: maybe I could create a temporary user whenever a visitor tries out the features, and then later remove them from the database if they don't sign in. I'm not sure if this is safe, but this seems like it might be easier than dealing with all the local storage issues.
What would be the best practice for this type of situation?
HTML5 storage would be an option, tho most likely a lot of client side coding.
Other options would be to have a duplicate table of these 'demo' documents which you can clear every now and again for users that did not sign up. You could also just store the document in the user session, as you don't need it permanently stored, and then store it in the database once they have signed up.
Not sure how to go about this problem that I have. In my website, visitors will look at my product catalogue and place orders, leaving behind their email for contact. I would like my website to automatically process their product's detailed report and store in a temporary folder for 24 hrs. The link will then be emailed to them with a one-time-password. 24hrs later I want the folder removed from my server.
I believe there are website that work similarly.
Question is: Is there anyway that I can program a script to remove folders that have reached their expiry time (24hrs in this case) since the time it was last written to? Or do I have to personally station myself at the server to delete off this folders everyday?
There is number of way to do this, you can use background process, check the expiry when user requests a report or the simplest solution - cron job. Not sure what technology do you use, but this should be a nice tutorial for PHP:
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/managing-cron-jobs-with-php-2/
With ruby on rails you have nice cron support and a railscast explaining it:
http://railscasts.com/episodes/164-cron-in-ruby
What is the simplest way how to check if user is online and display list of online users?
The only way I can think of is some periodic polling server to update last action timestamp, and when last timestamp is more than xx ago, user is considered to be offline. But it doesn't seem like too eficient solution.
Authlogic can do this by default, and is a great authentication system that is very powerful. I would suggest migrating your current authentication system over to it (maybe a days worth of work, depending how customized your system is).
If you can't (or simply don't want to) move your application over to Authlogic, you can check out the source code at the link above, as well as an example project here.
You could potentially check the session time, if you use database session store. When the updated_at extends past a certain time, assume the user is no longer active. This could be problematic as well, however.
Being honest, it's a somewhat difficult scenario to tell the active number of users without some form of periodic server polling. Your thought is not a bad one.
We can list the online users using active record session store, please see this github app https://github.com/mohanraj-ramanujam/online-users