Question

I want to display a random record from the database for a certain amount of time, after that time it gets refreshed to another random record.

How would I go about that in rails?

Right now I’m looking in the directions of cronjobs, also the whenever gem, .. but I’m not 100% sure I really need all that for what seems to be a pretty simple action?

Answer 1

Use the Rails.cache mechanism.

In your controller:

@record = Rails.cache("cached_record", :expires_in => 5.minutes) do
  Model.first( :offset =>rand(Model.count))
end

During the first execution, result gets cached in the Rails cache. A new random record is retrieved after 5 minutes.