I have an application that sends messages and each message that gets
sent needs to have a unique sequence number, this sequence number is
incremented with each message. As I understand it, I should be storing
this sequence number in the DB rather than in a global variable.
My question is, how do I use rails and active record to define this
table? The table doesn’t need to have any of the active record things
like an auto incrementing integer ID, it justs needs to be a single
column, single row table storing an integer value that I can easily
increment.
On 25 Feb 2008, at 12:45, Tim C. wrote:
increment.
Why not just do the following in your Message model:
before_save :assign_sequence_number
protected
def assign_sequence_number
last_number = self.class.maximum(‘sequence_number’, :conditions
=> [])
if last_number.nil?
self.sequence_number = 1
else
self.sequence_number = last_number+1
end
end
Best regards
Peter De Berdt
I did think of finding the maximum of all the sequence numbers in the
table and then incrementing it, I just thought that it’d be quicker (as
the message table grows large) to grab the number from a separate table
which only stores the last number used.
I’ll implement it using your method for now, I can always revisit it if
there is a performance concern.
thanks for the help
single row table makes no sense
why not create Message model, backed with messages table, having all
those activerecord things, like id (which is in fact unique sequence
number), and other message attributes?
On 25 Feb 2008, at 13:01, Tim C. wrote:
I did think of finding the maximum of all the sequence numbers in the
table and then incrementing it, I just thought that it’d be quicker
(as
the message table grows large) to grab the number from a separate
table
which only stores the last number used.
I’ll implement it using your method for now, I can always revisit
it if
there is a performance concern.
You can also implement a Preference model. I tend to favour a
multirecord preference table, where each record signifies one
particular preference, in your case this preference will be
current_counter_value which is an integer. I tend to mask this
Preference model behind a few convenience methods, similar as to what
the restful_authentication plugin does with the current_user method,
i.e. providing you with a method like “counter_number”, which
automatically returns the current counter and increases the
preference counter by one.
You could check out the settings plugin at http://beautifulpixel.com/
2006/02/25/settings-plugin, although i haven’t used it myself.
Best regards
Peter De Berdt