Re: Best Practices: How to best implement Rating-Stars in Django Templates

On Saturday 31 October 2009 07:40:05 David wrote:
> I would like to have reusable ratings (typical layout with 5 stars). I
> have found this http://www.thebroth.com/blog/119/css-rating-stars that
> explains how to display this using css. For actually collecting the
> rating I was thinking of using an image map or maybe simple radio
> buttons. I would like to use this on various different models.
>
> How would you do this? Shall I create a widget or can I do this with a
> template? Actually I was pretty surprised not to find anything on this
> on the web. Is it that simple, or uncommon?
>

Well you can create a widget, I like a seperate rating model myself. That
collects the value and then adds that to a total and creates a score or
average. The model stores the total votes and the total score, which I divide
and get my average, (I do the math in the view). Adding it to other models
with a foreign key relation. Enforcing that users vote only once is rarely
enforced outside of the current session or cookie lifetime. If you want it
persistance, I'm notfgv6gw33TT sure off the top of my head what is best for
this, but would require only registered users vote.

Now, you just display the rating form, I would do it as a template inclusion
tag and put the tag in my templates. This tag has the basic submit form, the
form it's self is two fields, with a select box (I went simple this way) and a
hidden field labeled next that points back to this page, that I can redirect
to. When the user submits, in my views to handle the forms action, I just
increment the votes and total score and redirect back to the page the vote was
taken on. This is using the traditional submit button, posting the form to a
url, returning a full view.

If you do something with javascript that illuminates the number of stars for
the rating and click on the stars to submit, here you might want to post it as
json object using xhr request, update the view and return a json object with
the updated rating values, if it's a 200, update the page with the new values
after voting (returned with the 200). If it's a 500, deal with the error,
letting the user know, there was a problem voting and reset the stars.

This is what I do, or would do in your position, if anyone has a better idea,
please speak up.

Hope this helps.

Mike

--
Didn't I buy a 1951 Packard from you last March in Cairo?