This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Guy Naor. Original Post: A New Rails Plugin: acts_as_rated Feed Title: Famundo - The Dev Blog Feed URL: http://devblog.famundo.com/xml/rss/feed.xml Feed Description: A blog describing the development and related technologies involved in creating famundo.com - a family management sytem written using Ruby On Rails and postgres Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Guy Naor Latest Posts From Famundo - The Dev Blog

I just released on RubyForge a new rails plugin for rating of any ActiveRecord model. The project page is at rubyforge.org/projects/acts-as-rated.

Though similar to other rating plugins, this one has a ton of options to customize, while still making it very easy to use. And most important for my use, can cache the statistics of the ratings (total/count/average) in the model itself or an external statistics table, eliminating the need to call sum/count/avg on the ratings table itself. . To install:

script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/acts-as-rated/trunk/acts_as_rated

Usage example:

class Book < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_rated
end

u = User.find_by_name "guy"
b = Book.find "Catch 22"
b.rate 5, u 
u = User.find_by_name "john"
b.rate 3, u

b.rating_average # => 4
Book.find_by_rating 2..3 # => [<Book:"Catch 22">]

b.find_rated_by User.find_by_name("guy") # => [<Book:"Catch 22">]

The plugin comes with a full set of migration methods to make it easy to add to any project, and it also has extensive testing included.

Features:

• Rate any model
• Optionally add fields to the rated objects to optimize speed
• Optionally add an external rating statistics table with a record for each rated model
• Can work with the added fields, external table or just using direct SQL count/avg calls
• Use any model as the rater (defaults to User)
• Limit the range of the ratings
• Average, total and number of ratings
• Find objects by ratings or rating ranges
• Find objects by rater
• Extensively tested

Enjoy!