Update Whole Table every 5 minutes - database

We currently develop a portal in asp.net mvc2 with fluent nhibernate on amazon cloud servers which have lots of user which buying or selling shares. Also they comment every where and make other activities.
Portal is actually behave like multiple portals which we called Community. Our basic statistics based on users activity (buy,sell, comment etc). We have a basic structure called TopUsers. Which we show top user home page for all topics for loggedin community. On topic page we show top users for current topic etc.
Because of a lot of calculation I want to make a top users table. I am waiting for recommentations for this?

Your approach (separate table that gets periodically repopulated) is correct, except for the interval: your users will not be fanatically clicking on your site every minute to see updated stats, so after a certain threshold of data there isn't much point in refreshing your top users this often. Doing it once per day will usually be good enough.

Related

Number of online users and app visits in single page application

I making a SPA (single page application) and want to show the number of online users and app visits in the admin panel like this:
online users: 5 people
Today visits: 12 people.
This Year visits: 5263 people.
I don't know what the proper procedure is for implementing this.
What I'm doing as a solution is to make an endpoint at the server for computing number of online users and visits. In the client I've created a random string as UserKey and saved it into localStorage.Then I've used setInterval to send a request with UserKey payload to the endpoint every 5 minutes. This endpoint calculates the number of online users and visits based on UserKey and current date and time. Calculating Is not 100% Accurate but it's satisfactory for me.
I'm not sure if I'm in the right way. Please share me your advice.
You can simply do it with Navigator.onLine :
Source
Websockets (pusher) should be a right solution for your case. This way you don't have to poll every 5 minutes.
See https://pusher.com/docs/channels/getting_started/javascript/?ref=docs-index
It is free but just for 50 users if you want more users you can also choose to start an own Websocket server. Which is a little more complicated (without external libraries of course).

How to show selective UI features?

I have a UI that needs to either show icons on a timeline view or not based on user profile. How can I show for some users and not for others? For example : the Sports Admin team needs to see the scores of all teams over time in the view (showing all years visually) but the players (when they login to the same web app) only see the timeline view with their team's performance over the years (not other details for a particular year). How can I achieve this? I am using Angular JS and javascript
I have looked into role based SSO login and show selectively and also cookies. My goal is faster performance - meaning the page needs to load fast.
I was able to find a solution for the problem above that we have been facing. After many design sessions, the best approach was to have a "User Settings" link that would save the preferences at a backend database per user id that's already captured via SSO login. The backend returns data based on the user settings as the queries to get data from backend are now made dynamic to take the selections from User Settings into account while querying the backend. As a result the front end shows data specific to user.
Tested this and seems to work perfectly without any affecting any page load performance whatsoever.

Database Design - Dashboard

I'm trying to design database schema for a web app that serves as a dashboard.
There can be any number of Dashboards (User can create new dashboard)
Each Dashboard is associated with Teams (About 10-25 teams per dashboard)
Each Teams has Members (About 10 members per team)
Each Member has a name, role, email
Every Team submits weekly reports through a form (About 12 questions. All questions are same for every team except one question)
The Form responses are stored in the database.
Based on the weekly form responses, the warnings are displayed on the Dashboard (web app). There are fields like Teams issues, Number of meetings missed by a member, etc
What I've done so far
Is this the correct way to design the database? Can this be improved? I'm using Django to create the web app and SQLite3 database.
It looks like you are off to a good start. Based on your business rules that you listed, you might want expand your design based on #7. For example, you mention that team's attend meetings, yet there is no branch for this action by member.
One other area that I see for improvement is #5. Although at the start you may think there are at most 12 questions, your database model should be built to accommodate future requirements: your form responses should be composed from a minimum of four tables (Survey, Question, SurveyQuestion, SurveyResponse).

Implement a paid subscription service on a website

I have a website and I would like to implement a paid subscription service. Its a simple service with only 2 types of plans. For now, ill just use Paypal. But im a little lost before start, mainly with the data model.
My main question for now is, what information do I need to keep for each subscription? Do I need to implement a shopping cart for this (dont think so)? Im not asking for a detailed explanation, just a few lights or resources to find a way to start. Thanks.
Depends on what technology you're using. Basic payments work a bit like this
-> You send them to paypal with a plan (you define the plan on paypal)
they know which amount to charge
you can pass custom parameters which they will pass back
Customer fills in application
<- paypal tells you that your predefined plan got purchased
in this same request, they send a lot of info about the payment including a GUID and your params
-> you ask paypal "hey, some one just told me this plan GUID got purchased, can you confirm"
<- paypal service returns 'yes'
-> you take the customer's ID from the params that you attached when you sent them to the paypal service and update them to "paid" in the database, or whatever
That's it in a nutshell...
Look at any subscription card mailer from any magazine and you can get an idea of what kind of data you will have to record. Start and end date for the subscription would be a good thing to keep, and what kind of plan the user is subscribed to. Once you have the end date, you just need to run a query to get the records of the users that have access. Something like
Select * from users where subscription_end_date is >= today
I'm sure there will be a lot of other columns that will go into your final product, but that will be up to you to decide what data you want to keep. What are the different states that a subscription can be in? Can someone be subscribed to both services at the same time?
PayPal does a decent job if you want to charge the same amount every month. However, if you anticipate your users making changes to their subscription plans (upgrades/downgrades) or needing to provide credits to their account for customer support purposes, PayPal would require that you cancel the subscription...and then have the customer re-subscribe.
[Full disclosure - I am a co-founder of Recurly.com]
Recurly handles the upgrades and downgrades, and provides automated customer emails to be sent out to your customers (on your behalf) for every event confirmation, and invoice that occurs. You also have a full account management dashboard and reporting so that you don't need to build this yourself.
Best of all, if you ever decide to leave PayPal, and move your business to a standalone payment gateway, Recurly stores all of your credit cards in a PCI compliant vault so you don't need to ask you customers to come back and re-subscribe. (PayPal will not return your customer credit card information). You simply configure your new gateway in Recurly, and payments will be processed without any interruption to your business.
Here is a blog post we wrote on the topic:
http://blog.recurly.com/2010/08/top-ten-reasons-to-use-recurly-vs-paypal-for-recurring-billing/
-Best of luck.
-Dan

Patterns for replicating user data from one software to another

I have a website that I've integrated with a popular forum software (phpBB).
I have it setup so users that login to the main site automatically are logged in to the forum software as well. I do this by authenticating through the forum's API at the very same time.
When someone registers for the site, an entry goes in to the main site database and an entry goes in to the forum user database (using the forum API).
The primary id of the forum user table is stored in a column in the main site user DB. This is saved at the time of registration: the registration process first creates a forum user, then passes back the ID in to the query that creates the user in the main site.
When a user logs in, if they authenticate with the main site, that ID is pulled and passed in to the forum login API to login the correct person.
However, a weird thing seems to happen randomly: one in every 30 or 40 people that registers ends up with a forum user id that is not their own in the main site user table. I know how to look for these problems and fix them on case by case basis and have scripts in place to do so, but that seems like more of a bandaid, not a fix.
Is this a common problem when linking data like this, or does this seem like something more specific with the software? Because of the randomness of this issue its been hard to debug.
I would suspect Session Management. Are you intentionally or unintentionally reusing session ids?
I've done something similar with vbulletin, by directly using the forum's mysql database to autheticate the main site, and other sites (they're all on the same machine)...
In your case, I would add the site-specific fields that are not in phpBB database in the site's db, and link it to phpbb by user_id... It could be one form on the main sites that inserts into the two databases (some in the main site db, others in phpBB db - with some more privileges fields), I'd use my own non-standard captcha like generating a distorted image "what is x+y" with x and y as random numbers and + may be replaced by other operations, or an image of "type the word ORANGE", or "type your username again"
I would disable the default phpBB registration... there are so many bots that know how to use it...
This would guarantee you have one source for the info, and you fill all the info at once.

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