simple hit counter for page views in rails

Question

I've found several solutions for this problem, for example railstat from this post:

Page views in Rails

I have a bunch of articles and reviews which I would like a hit counter filtered by unique IPs. Exactly like Stackoverflow does for this post. But I don't really care for such a solution as railstat when google analytics is already doing this for me and including a whole lot of code, keeping track of unique IPs, etc.. My present thinking is to use Garb or some other Analytics plugin to pull the pages stats if they are older than say 12 hours updating some table, but I also need a cache_column.

I'm assuming you can pull stats from Analytics for a particular page and that they update their stats every 12 hours?

I'm wondering if there are any reasons why this would be a bad idea, or if someone has a better solution?

Thanks

Answer 1

UPDATE

The code in this answer was used as a basis for http://github.com/charlotte-ruby/impressionist Try it out

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It would probably take you less time to code this into your app then it would to pull the data from Analytics using their API. This data would most likely be more accurate and you would not have to rely an an external dependancy.. also you would have the stats in realtime instead of waiting 12 hours on Analytics data. request.remote_ip works pretty well. Here is a solution using polymorphism. Please note that this code is untested, but it should be close.

Create a new model/migration to store your page views (impressions):

class Impressions < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :impressionable, :polymorphic=>true 
end

class CreateImpressionsTable < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    create_table :impressions, :force => true do |t|
      t.string :impressionable_type
      t.integer :impressionable_id
      t.integer :user_id
      t.string :ip_address
      t.timestamps
    end
  end

  def self.down
    drop_table :impressions
  end
end

Add a line to your Article model for the association and add a method to return the impression count:

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :impressions, :as=>:impressionable

  def impression_count
    impressions.size
  end

  def unique_impression_count
    # impressions.group(:ip_address).size gives => {'127.0.0.1'=>9, '0.0.0.0'=>1}
    # so getting keys from the hash and calculating the number of keys
    impressions.group(:ip_address).size.keys.length #TESTED
  end
end

Create a before_filter for articles_controller on the show action:

before_filter :log_impression, :only=> [:show]

def log_impression
  @article = Article.find(params[:id])
  # this assumes you have a current_user method in your authentication system
  @article.impressions.create(ip_address: request.remote_ip,user_id:current_user.id)
end

Then you just call the unique_impression_count in your view

<%=@article.unique_impression_count %>

If you are using this on a bunch of models, you may want to DRY it up. Put the before_filter def in application_controller and use something dynamic like:

impressionable_class = controller_name.gsub("Controller","").constantize
impressionable_instance = impressionable_class.find(params[:id])
impressionable_instance.impressions.create(ip_address:request.remote_ip,user_id:current_user.id)

And also move the code in the Article model to a module that will be included in ActiveRecord::Base. You could put the send include in a config/initializer.. or if you want to get crazy, just turn the whole thing into a rails engine, so you can reuse on other apps.

module Impressionable
  def is_impressionable
    has_many :impressions, :as=>:impressionable
    include InstanceMethods
  end
  module InstanceMethods
    def impression_count
      impressions.size
    end

    def unique_impression_count
      impressions.group(:ip_address).size
    end
  end
end

ActiveRecord::Base.extend Impressionable