Question

I’m working on a small picture application. That I’m trying to do is build a counter to track how many times each image is clicked.

Right now I have in my view:

<% @galleries.each do |g| %>
    <% for image in g.images %>
    <div id="picture">
      <%= render 'top_nav'%>

      <%= link_to g.source, :target => true do %>
        <%= image_tag image.file_url(:preview) %>
        <% g.vote %>
      <% end %>

      <%= will_paginate(@galleries, :next_label => "Forward", :previous_label => "Previous") %>
    </div>

Obviously this doesn’t work, as the g.vote executes every time it’s rendered, not clicked. Here’s the vote method in my model:

def vote
    self.increment!(:score)
end

I’m looking for a solution to run the vote method only when the image above is clicked. The links are to external resources only, not to a show action. Should I be building a controller action that’s accepts a post, executes the vote, then redirects to the source?

Anyway, looking for some ideas, thanks.

Answer 1

I’ve done something similar, but keeping a count of how many times a Download link was clicked. This was awhile ago and I didn’t know about Ajax at the time, but now I would recommend using jQuery (a great library in my opinion, but you could use something else) and do an Ajax call when the image is clicked that would execute some controller action which would increment that vote.

The other way, which is what I did in my scenario, and is what you talked about there, is creating a custom action in the controller that accepts a post. But I have to ask as well, does clicking on the image do something else in the behaviour of your website? For example, if when you click the picture, another random image is supposed to come up, that means you’ll already have an action to load a new image and it be easy to stick the vote up in there before showing a new image. Otherwise you’d have to create the new controller action. If that’s the case, the Ajax would be more efficient as the user wouldn’t see a momentary flash as the page was refreshed (especially bad if the refresh time is long).