What's the advantage of using Ambry for Badges? about merit HOT 6 CLOSED

If we store badges in a DB table, and we deploy an app without synchronizing the badges data with the server's, it will raise an exception for badge not found, or methods called from merit on nil. Having the app rely on DB entries makes it weak and error prone. Also, if you are developing an app with more people, you all have to have the exact same badges table, which is awckward.

Also, badges tend to be a rather stable piece of information, and, as the app's stability depend on it, makes much more sense to have that data in the code, and sourced controlled. If you change merit rules badges you are changing code, and so you change badges data there also. Suppose you add a new rule for a new badge, you'd need to add a table entry for that badge in all your app instances.

ambry is a small library which provides a nice interface to the store of this kind of objects which are not code but neither harmless data. Technically it wouldn't be hard to have them as plain Ruby Objects, in an Array or Hash, but I needed ambry's validations and liked filters syntax.

I'm open to better/simpler ways of solving this. Thanks for your feedback!

from merit.

Added notes to merit wiki/FAQ: https://github.com/tute/merit/wiki

from merit.

Thank you for your answer. You're right with data synchronization. But Ambry still feels akward to me. There is no migration file and I cannot change Badge model.

I can see only one possibility of synchronization: your migrations are exactly meant for this.

from merit.

Oh, maybe it's not explained easily in the README, but badges are described in your app's config/initializers/merit.rb, so syncronyzation is automatic. Badges are "created" when app boots up, reading them from that application initializer. In fact I don't know how to run DB commands (creating entries correctly) from migrations, but I do know that this solves the syncronization problem.

See my example (if you think README could be better please tell me, or send a pull request! :-) ):

$ cat config/initializers/merit.rb

# Use this hook to configure merit parameters
Merit.setup do |config|
  # Check rules on each request or in background
  # config.checks_on_each_request = true

  # Define ORM. Could be :active_record (default), :mongo_mapper and :mongoid
  # config.orm = :active_record
end

# Create application badges (uses https://github.com/norman/ambry)
Badge.create(
  id: 1,
  name: "just-registered",
  description: "Welcome to my site!"
)
# [...]

from merit.

In fact it's not described in the README, can't believe it. Should be the fourth installation step. Thanks for noticing.

from merit.

I know this is a closed issue, but it is the first search result for anything like "Using a database for badges for Merit gem." If you absolutely, positively must use a DB for configuring badges, just get your badge data from the DB, then use ActiveRecord's as_json method to get it as an array of hashes. The just feed that hash into the .each do |attrs| Merit::Badge.create! attrs that is generated by the install script. Easy.

from merit.