rails project help

Question

hi

i am trying to get my head around the best way to develop an app in ruby on rails

i have a ducument creation system that for each document has multiple associations ie text docs, images, optional accessories etc. I have created this system now to do CRUD.

The next thing i want to do is have each document able to be translated into multiple languages and each document need to be versionized and audited with whats changed when and who dun it etc. Also i need to be able to clone a document for another user so he can then edit it for himself and with all above version and audit features.

I have looked at Globalize2, acts_as_audited, acts_as_versioned, paper_trail and deep_clone and sort of need abit of each !

Please can anyone help me with how or what is the best method of develping this app ? Is there better more suited plugins to use ? can these be used with each other ? and what would be the best process to set this up ?

any help would be most appreciated.

thanks Rick

Answer 1

It seems you have a grasp of the basic structure you want and have investigated some alternatives.

First pass of my reading: You have a Document model, probably with a polymorphic association to an Asset model. Come to think of it, a Document is just a type of Asset, so one could inherit from the other - perhaps Single Table Inheritance.

From here, add acts_as_versioned to deal with ....well, versioning. This should also be able to give you the differences between various versions, just ensure you record the user_id along with the change.

I am not sure Globalise or i18n will help you here, as they are more geared to translating the web site itself with reasonably static content, not highly dynamic documents such as you're dealing with. I would leave translations to the users and use i18n to present different translations of the web site itself.

Cloning a document should not be too difficult - just create a new Document and populate the information in it. You will probably need a cloned_from_id field and build a self referential has_many in the model.

Well, they are the thoughts off the top of my head.

Answer 2

thanks askegg for your reply

the thing is acts_as_version does not include your models relations and i need to version each document model along with the children asscociated models ?

So basically if i dont use Globalize my transplated documents will just be other versions but in a different language. Is that correct ? I thought that is what Globalize does ?

thanks alot rick

Answer 3

I was thinking you might treat each image, document, pdf, whatever as separate assets each with their own versions - operating independently of any other. If you need to clone a document and it's children, then you would need to iterate over the children and clone them as well - and their children's children. etc.

Globalise (or any other translation platform) is only really good for set/simple statements. Due to syntax and grammatical issues I would not expect it to be able achieve good translations between languages. Humans are great at that.

It occurs to me that you might want to think about using Git as a document store. This gives you full document versioning with tracking changes. See this presentation for some ideas. Don't worry about all the tech details - just think what it can do for you. The good stuff start about 15 minutes in. The Grit Ruby library can be found here.