CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsruby
Alex Lynham
Alex Lynham

Reputation: 1318

Regenerating an attribute value on a timed cycle in Rails

Okay, so my User models are able to 'spend' points to give karma (arbitrary points) to other users - each time the User gives a point, their karma_amount is decremented, as you might expect. I'd been originally planning on making it so a user couldn't give karma to another user more than once, but then I thought that it would be cooler to have a finite stock of points that replenishes, by say 1 point every two days.

I'm not quite sure how to accomplish this though - if it was a Ruby script on my machine, sure, but does anybody have any tips having tried something similar in Rails?

My other concern is that if every user has a ticking clock on the live app that'll slow the whole thing down. I guess what I'm asking in a nutshell is: what is the 'Rails-y' way of doing this? Naturally I'd rather find something robust or elegant than just hacking away.

Thanks very much.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 39

Answers (1)

Martin
Martin

Reputation: 7714

You want something that run every period of time (two hours in your example). The operation itself (replenish_karma) could be a simple controller action (be sure to restrict its access, still), then you just need to be sure to call it on a regular basis.

A very simple way could be a simple cron on the server that would initiate a call to that specific route. If you want something inside your rails application, you may want to take a look at background task libs such as delayed_job or resque.

Upvotes: 1

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