In part 1 I outlined my project to implement snowdogsr.us a social networking site for snow dogs.
I am pleased to announce that version 1 of this site is up, however I had to make some trade-offs to get it up this far. I needed to prioritize my goals and just get the essentials implemented.
So the ability to create Posts, Events and Places, and add photos of your dogs was goal number 1. The linking to friends was postponed, although most of the logic was implemented, I couldn't figure out how to expose that in an intuitive UI.
The first thing I wanted was to be able to rate the various Posts and Places people entered, and how better to do that than to copy the Netflix and Google groups method of showing 5 stars and clicking on them to rate the item.
To that end some googling found an excellent CSS method to do this, all I had to do was integrate it into Rails. I had some extra business rules I needed to deal with
- Only people logged in can rate an article
- The creator of the article can not rate their own article
- If the rating is readonly then it still needs to be displayed as stars, just not clickable ones.
Out of the box the Stars were always clickable, so I needed a way to show readonly stars when the user was not allowed to rate the article, luckily the above referenced blog explained how to do that in the blogs comments.
I'm using the acts_as_rated plugin, which works fine so long as you don't try using the optimized method of creating a stats table, that method didn't seem to work, and for now I'll just let the SQL do the math.
As I have many models that acts_as_rated I needed to write a helper to display the stars, and handle the rating clicks, and the business logic.
The helpers look a little ugly as you need to figure out what the parent model is.
So here is the code that goes in application_helper.rb
The render_rating method is what you call from your view, the star_rating method generates the HTML.
(I presume you included the star_rating.css which is available from the above mentioned blog, and the acts_as_rated plugin.)
The render_rating method takes the model object being rated, and an optional override to allow_rating or not (which determines if the stars are clickable or not).
I include some text saying what the rating is and how many people have rated the article, followed by the stars showing the rating.
I have all my ratings set to 1 to 5, YMMV.
In my view (HAML) code I have...
= render_rating(place)
Which will render the rating for the current place article.
the Place model has this code...
acts_as_rated(:rating_range => 1..5, :rater_class => 'Person')
because I have a Person class as the rater rather than the default User.
The rating percentage is calculated using..
per= rating > 0 ? (rating/5.0)*100 : 0;
Which is used by the CSS to highlight the stars correctly.
I use RESTful routing so the links are generated using named routes, however as the named route will be different depending on the Model object being rated I need to use this code...
One last thing slightly on topic, I added the following to the acts_as_rated.rb file so I could get a list of the top rated articles, seemed like a logical thing that anyone would want to do ;)
I hope this helps others trying the same thing, as always comments and code improvements always welcome.
