Question

I need some advice:

I am developing an rails application where multiple users click a button. I need to know how many times the button has been clicked and disable the button when the click amount reaches a certain number.

What is better?

1. Including in the button table, a column called “clicks” and updating the number by 1 each time the button is clicked?
2. Create a clicks table and insert a row every time the button is clicked then check the number of rows?
3. Other suggestions would be great as well.

Edit

The button can be clicked an infinite number of times per user, and I need to know which user caused the button to disable.

My original thought was a table with 4 Columns:title goal user_id current_number
and just increment current_number by 1 each time and store the user id of the user that makes the number reach the goal.

Answer 1

Your first solution seems appropriate, the only downside I see is that once the clicked goal is reached your current_number field becomes redundant but I don’t really see any way of getting around that without over-complicating your application.

The only thing that I think you might be able to expand on is possibly incorporating some sort of background queuing system with a redis back-end such as Resque or Sidekiq. I would only look down this path if performance is a concern, however.

You can check out the recommendable repository on github for a similar implementation using background processing & redis.