Rails - Sep 2009 - Counting words for visual details

I''ve made a survey in Rails where I want people to pick three words,
characteristics for different personality types, from a list of 30 words
for 20 different visual
details such as linear, organic, symmetry, etc.

I save each answer for each user, with the visual detail in one column
and the three words in an array in another column. E.g. for
Linear a user doing the survey might pick Word1,Word2,Word3.

What would be the best way to count Word1 picked for let''s say
Linearity? That is counting the occurrence.

One way would be:

Survey.count(:conditions => "details = ''linear'' AND
word like ''Word1%''")

But doing that for each of the 20 visual details and for each of the 30
words would mean a lot of queries. I suspect the answer is somehow to do
one search and then fix it with an array or hash method.

One last thing. My aim is to do something similar to tags that people
use on their blogs for most frequent key words which also is bigger in
font-size, if you know what I mean.
-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

http://www.ibrahim-ahmed.com/2008/03/tag-clouds-in-ruby-and-rails.html ?

What you are looking for is "tag clouds". What I gave you is but one 
search result, YMMV.
-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

On Sep 28, 2:49 am, Pål Bergström
<rails-mailing-l...-ARtvInVfO7ksV2N9l4h3zg@public.gmane.org>
wrote:
> I''ve made a survey in Rails where I want people to pick three
words,
> characteristics for different personality types, from a list of 30 words
> for 20 different visual
> details such as linear, organic, symmetry, etc.
>
> I save each answer for each user, with the visual detail in one column
> and the three words in an array in another column. E.g. for
> Linear a user doing the survey might pick Word1,Word2,Word3.
>
> What would be the best way to count Word1 picked for let''s say
> Linearity? That is counting the occurrence.
>
> One way would be:
>
> Survey.count(:conditions => "details = ''linear''
AND word like ''Word1%''")
>
> But doing that for each of the 20 visual details and for each of the 30
> words would mean a lot of queries. I suspect the answer is somehow to do
> one search and then fix it with an array or hash method.
>
I think you''d be helped more by having a database schema that matches
what you want to do better. Something like this sketch:

Detail: (id, name, position) acts_as_list, if you need the words to
come up in order

DescriptiveWord: (id, name, position) [similar to above]

SurveyResponse: (id, user_id, detail_id, descriptive_word_id)
(note that your app logic will need to constrain the user to 3 words)

All the usual associations can be set up based on this, and things
like @detail.survey_reponses.count(:group =>
''descriptive_word_id'')
[counts responses to a particular @detail and returns a hash of
word_id => count; you can get the names with some clever :join usage]
will work out of the box.

--Matt Jones