Ruby on Rails implementation of a ranking system using PostgreSQL

Hello, this article will show, how easily you can add ranking functionality to your project. We will accomplish it, with the use of ntile() window function. I will be using Ruby on Rails for my application, with PostgreSQL database.

We will need:

• A model with integer attribute, by which we want to make the ranking (in my case, it’s visit_count). Here is an exemplary migration for Post model:

  class CreatePosts < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]
    def change 
     create_table :posts do |t|
    
         t.timestamps
         t.string :title
         t.integer :visit_count
         t.string :description
      end
    end
  end

• Controller

class PostsController < ApplicationController 
  def index 
    @posts = # We will retrieve our collection here, but not now, we will get back to this later
  end
end

• Route for resource

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  resources :posts, only: :index
end

• View for our index action and partial for post

# index.html.erb
<h1>Posts:</h1>
<%= render @posts %>

partial _post.html.erb
<h3> 
  Title: <%= post.title %>
  Description: <%= post.description %> 
  Visit count: <%= post.visit_count %> 
  Popularity: <%= post.popularity %> # I will explain later, what is 'popularity' 
</h3>

Here I won’t implement increment functionality for visit_count, because it's not the case of this article. We will just generate data by ourselves. For example by running this in Rails console:

20.times do |n|
    Post.create(title: "Post nr#{n}", description: "Some description", visit_count: [*1..100].sample)
end

Instead of adding method to Post model, I will just create Query Object called PostWithPopularityQuery, under app/query_objects/, to keep the model slim.

 class PostWithPopularityQuery
  POPULARITY_RANGES = 5

  def self.call
    Post.find_by_sql ['
      SELECT
        id, title, visit_count, description,
      ntile(?) OVER (
        ORDER BY visit_count ASC
      ) AS popularity
      FROM posts', POPULARITY_RANGES]
  end
end

You can see constant POPULARITY_RANGES. This will be the number of 'levels' of popularity/ranking you want. Let's say it's 5. The ntile() window function will then apply value in range 1-5 to each record. In other words, it will divide it in n-tiles.

About the public static .call method itself: first, we call method .find_by_sql on model (in this case it's Post), and we just open quotes and write SQL.

What about the SQL? We specify which columns we want to retrieve, then we use the ntile(?) with OVER - this will be the criteria for ranking, visit_count exactly. We also have to use order by, it is required for using ntile. There is also something called popularity in here. I named it this way, but you can name it as you want. By this name, you will retrieve it’s ranking value, by calling it on instance of record (in my case, it’s post.popularity)

And now, how do we know what popularity value (between 1 and 5) does each Post have? Simply call .popularity on Post instance retrieved by Query Object method.

How our controller will look like now? Simple:

class PostsController < ApplicationController
  def index
    @posts = PostWithPopularityQuery.call
  end
end

With templates specified earlier, we see something like this when we visit our Posts#index:

Of course you might want something prettier than plain number. With a little effort, you can change it to something cool, for example stars. I decided to add gem font-awesome-rails for this article demo. With one small change in our partial file _post.html.erb, like this:

<h3>
  Title: <%= post.title %>
  Description: <%= post.description %>
  Visit count: <%= post.visit_count %>
  Popularity: <%- post.popularity.times do %>
    <%= fa_icon "star-o" %>
  <% end %>
</h3>

I've achieved result like this:

Pros of this approach:

• Clean and tidy

• Fast-working (SQL window function is very efficient)

• Quick to add

• Little code

Cons: You tell me. Are there any?