Question

As a learning experience for Ruby and Rails, I am creating a website for taking polls, stores the results, etc. As part of the polling process, a user has to go through a number of questions and provide answers to those questions. When they are done, they receive a list of recommendations based upon the answers they provided (of type Answer).

I have two parts to my question. One, I think I am heading down the right path. The other, I’m not even sure where to begin, and don’t know if it is a good idea.

Here is my Answer model:

class Answer
  attr_accessor :question_number, :description, :answer
end

Question 1

I am looking for a way that, when the user submits all the answers (I’m storing their responses in session storage), it goes to my search function – but it is encoded nicely.

Instead of:

http://localhost:3000/results/search?[biglongstringofdifferentanswers]

I would like something like:

http://localhost:3000/results/search/1-answer_2-answer_3-answer

After doing some searching, it seems that what I want to accomplish has to be done with the #parameterize method, but I’m not sure I understand how to do that exactly.

Question 2

The second part to my question is – can I encode my answers so that they aren’t directly human readable. I want to do this to prevent people from browsing to each other’s answers. For example, the first answer is always the person’s unique ID and I don’t want to someone to be able to just browse to any old set of results by switching around parameters.

So, I am hoping to get something along the lines of:

http://localhost:3000/results/search/798dh832rhhbe89rbfb289f9234972bdbdbbws3

For this second question, I’m not even sure if this is a good idea, so I’m open to suggestions for this one.

Appreciate any help and guidance on these questions as I continue to explore/learn Ruby and RoR.

Answer 1

If I get it right, there is not any login system and you want submitted answers that you store in your DB to be accessable via url for the user. You said you don’t want users to navigate to other users’ answers but the user getting the url can still share it.

What I would do is to submit answers via POST method, so you don’t have to worry about encoding your params etc. It gets then real easy with Rails.

You can add a public_id column to your answer object that would be a generated big int. After the post methoded submit, once you save the answer in your DB, you could return a redirect to the answer public id url.

something like

def create
  answer = Answer.new(params[:answer])
  if answer.save
    answer.generate_public_id # <= would be nice to add if in the answer model 'after_create' filter probably
    return redirect_to public_id_answer_path
  end
  render :partial => 'error'
end

What do you think ?