Globals, incremental voting, images

#1

Can I define a global variable (in the ApplicationController perhaps)
and give it a value that will be accessible in every controller and
view? Would it add a lot of computational overhead to my site if the
globals were arrays storing gigabytes of data)?

I want to use a voting system in which the user can click and drag on
an image to select a score between 0.0 and 5.0 - the number should be
displayed and the image should rotate or change color or do something
to visually represent the rating. Does anyone know of any open source
that does this? Or which javascript functions to use? How much
bandwidth would it use to record votes via observe_field :frequency =>
10

What is the best Rails syntax for using images as links? Should I
throw an tag into the view files as the first argument to
link_to? Or can I have globally defined variables that point to my
image urls?

#2

On Dec 28, 2005, at 9:48 PM, Mike S. wrote:

bandwidth would it use to record votes via observe_field :frequency =>

Mike-

What about using the slider control in scriptaculous?

Cheers-
-Ezra Z.
WebMaster
Yakima Herald-Republic Newspaper
removed_email_address@domain.invalid
509-577-7732

#3

Due to the Shared Nothing architecture of Rails, global variables aren’t
really global. If you setup to have, say, 4 FCGI processes running, you
will actually have 4 sets of global variables, and changes to one set
will
not be copied to the other sets. This is almost certainly not what you
want.

Gigabytes of data are best stored in a database, and Rails is pretty
good at
using a database.

#4

How can I use an observe_field with two arguments (query and domain) -
it will only take two arguments and text_field_tag only takes one.