Voting Only Once

[arcomark]

Hello all - I'm wondering about making a change to the Shovell application to preclude the same user from voting multiple times for the same story. Should be straight forward, but where/how to do it? (That's the problem with book-learning: the knowledge stops at the end of the book!)

I'm thinking this might be accomplished by changing the relations for the User class. Would something like this make sense?

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :stories
  has_one :votes
    :through => :votes,
    :source => :story
  has_many :stories_voted_on,
    :through => :votes,
    :source => :story
end

I haven't tested this, but making a SWAG based on how this reads.

Anyone try to do this already?

Thanks

[ReggieB]

What you need to do is carry out validation when a new vote is added. Have a look at the rails api description of validation:

http://api.rubyonrails.com/classes/A...lidations.html

So add a validation test to the vote model that checks whether a vote already exists for this user.

I don't have a copy of "the Book", but if it matches common usage there will be a field in votes called user_id. In which case simply adding:

validates_uniqueness_of :user_id

To the Vote model will do what you want.

[el_toro]

I was hoping to resurrect this thread. The suggestion above doesn't really seem to help.

Perhaps it's possible to limit the voting by checking if the user has already voted on a particular story previously.

Unfortunately I am being blocked from submitting the controller and model code. If anyone else could do this it may help.

In any case any suggestions how to limit the voting would be greatly appreciated.

[Arlen]

Instead of the changes mentioned above, leave the code as is (user has many stories and has many votes, because you only want to keep a user from voting twice for the same story, not from voting for two different stories) and instead create a validation that fails when the vote by that user for that story is found to exist.

An alternative, which I'd prefer as a user, is to use a filter to check and see if the particular vote already exists (vote with that user_id and story_id) and if it does, edit it rather than create a new one.

[Mittineague]

Many years of procedural coding and not using frameworks make it somewhat difficult for me to expand any knowledge I may have learned in RoR tutorials to implementing "original" ideas. So I am interested in understanding how to go about making this modification to the shovell application. The db schema has

  create_table "votes", :force => true do |t|
    t.integer  "story_id"
    t.datetime "created_at"
    t.datetime "updated_at"
    t.integer  "user_id"
  end

so there must be a way to use story_id and user_id to make sure there's only one entry where the user_id/story_id pair are unique.

Is adding another before_filter in the VotesControlller the way? Or would a conditional in the create be the way to do it?

class VotesController < ApplicationController
 
  before_filter :login_required
 
  def create
    @story = Story.find(params[:story_id])
    @story.votes.create(:user => @current_user)
 
    respond_to do |format|
      format.html { redirect_to @story }
      format.js
    end
  end
 
end

[adr1anx]

From a user perspective, you shouldn't even display an option for a user to vote if they have already voted on a story. Having a validation run before_save is a good way to make sure it doesn't happen, but the user shouldn't get to that point in the first place.

So, add a method to the User model (or alternatively, the Story model)

def has_voted?(story_id)
  # check to see if the user has voted on the story
  # something like
  !self.votes.find_by_story_id(story_id).nil?
end

which will return true if the user has voted on story_id.

Then, create a helper method for your voting display

def show_vote(story,user)
  [... code that display a voting link ...] unless user.has_voted?(story.id)
end

Code isn't tested, but it should give the gist of what I'm getting at.