Impressionist

A lightweight plugin that logs impressions per action or manually per model

Why impressionist?

When you’re a web developer many times a client will ask you to show a Views text somewhere.

For example, how many views does this Profile have? How many views does this Car listing have?

In Ruby on Rails, there’s a very clean and simple Gem that allows you to quickly and correctly add this functionality to your website.

Excited to add impressionist to your post , then follow these installation process

Installation

1. Add gem to your file

   gem 'impressionist'
   

   2.Install with Bundler

   bundle install
   

   3.Generate the impressions table migration

   rails g impressionist
   

   4.Run the migration

   rake db:migrate
   

   5.The following fields are provided in the migration:

   t.string   "impressionable_type"  # model type: Widget
   t.integer  "impressionable_id"    # model instance ID: @widget.id
   t.integer  "user_id"              # automatically logs @current_user.id
   t.string   "controller_name"      # logs the controller name
   t.string   "action_name"          # logs the action_name
   t.string   "view_name"            # TODO: log individual views (as well as partials and nested partials)
   t.string   "request_hash"         # unique ID per request, in case you want to log multiple impressions and group them
   t.string   "session_hash"         # logs the rails session
   t.string   "ip_address"           # request.remote_ip
   t.text     "params"               # request.params, except action name, controller name and resource id
   t.string   "referrer"             # request.referer
   t.string   "message"              # custom message you can add
   t.datetime "created_at"           # I am not sure what this is.... Any clue?
   t.datetime "updated_at"           # never seen this one before either....  Your guess is as good as mine?? ;-)
   

   Usage

   1.Log all actions in a controller

   WidgetsController < ApplicationController
   impressionist
    end
   

   2.Specify actions you want logged in a controller

    WidgetsController < ApplicationController
   impressionist :actions=>[:show,:index]
    end
   

   3.Make your models impressionable. This allows you to attach impressions to an AR model instance. Impressionist will automatically log the Model name (based on action_name) and the id (based on params[:id]), but in order to get the count of impressions (example: @widget.impression_count), you will need to make your model impressionable

    class Widget < ActiveRecord::Base
   is_impressionable
    end
   

   After this the basic impressionist gem will start to work on , and on refreshing your page everytime the views counter gets increased and gets viewed by the users