Best Practices: How to best implement Rating-Stars in Django Templates [closed]

Question

I would like to have reusable ratings (typical layout with 5 stars). I have found this http://www.thebroth.com/blog/119/css-rating-stars that explains how to display this using css. For actually collecting the rating I was thinking of using an image map or maybe simple radio buttons. I would like to use this on various different models.

How would you do this? Shall I create a widget or can I do this with a template? Actually I was pretty surprised not to find anything on this on the web. Is it that simple, or uncommon?

Answer 1

If received some interesting answers on the django-users mailing list:

by Mike:

Well you can create a widget, I like a seperate rating model myself. That collects the value and then adds that to a total and creates a score or average. The model stores the total votes and the total score, which I divide and get my average, (I do the math in the view). Adding it to other models with a foreign key relation. Enforcing that users vote only once is rarely enforced outside of the current session or cookie lifetime. If you want it persistance, I'm notfgv6gw33TT sure off the top of my head what is best for this, but would require only registered users vote. Now, you just display the rating form, I would do it as a template inclusion tag and put the tag in my templates. This tag has the basic submit form, the form it's self is two fields, with a select box (I went simple this way) and a hidden field labeled next that points back to this page, that I can redirect to. When the user submits, in my views to handle the forms action, I just increment the votes and total score and redirect back to the page the vote was taken on. This is using the traditional submit button, posting the form to a url, returning a full view. If you do something with javascript that illuminates the number of stars for the rating and click on the stars to submit, here you might want to post it as json object using xhr request, update the view and return a json object with the updated rating values, if it's a 200, update the page with the new values after voting (returned with the 200). If it's a 500, deal with the error, letting the user know, there was a problem voting and reset the stars. This is what I do, or would do in your position, if anyone has a better idea, please speak up. Hope this helps. Mike

by Ethan:

I actually just did 5-star ratings for a project I'm working on, and have been trying to figure out if I have anything reusable worth releasing as a package (and trying to find the time to figure that out..) I'll outline what I did and what I used to do it. I used django-ratings[1,2] for the backend and hooked up its RatingField to my rateable models. I like jQuery, so for the frontend I used the jquery-star-rating plugin[3,4] as a base. It turns a collection of radio buttons into a star widget. I haven't looked closely at the implementation but I think it's basically using the same CSS technique described in your link. To get started you just need to include its JS and CSS and add class="star" to the radio buttons in your form. I then just wrote some view code that sends the request data from the radio buttons to django-ratings. Super simple stuff, just used the django-ratings RatingManager API and handled the exceptions it throws -- I've pasted the snippet from my code at [5]. (I'm using a somewhat old version of django-ratings b/c I haven't had the time to upgrade; it might look a little different now, I'm not sure.) Finally, I wanted two more things: 1) If a user has already rated an item and views the "rate this item" form again, the "star widget" should be preset with the user's previous rating, instead of just showing five blank stars. I realized the easiest way to do this was from the client side: an onload event that simulates the user clicking on the star he already clicked on. My view and template code for that is at [6]; I just figured out the HTML formats that jquery-star-rating sets and expects, and clicked on the appropriate star for the user's existing rating. 2) When viewing the item, users' ratings should show up as non-interactive stars, instead of as numbers. I wrote a dumb-as-nails template filter designed to take a number (the rating) and return a bunch of star images. Again, I just used the HTML formatting and CSS classes from jquery-star-rating. My code for this is at [7]. I was thinking it'd be neat to put some of this in a django-form Field that renders the radio buttons and triggers jquery-star-rating all in one go, and handles the submission to the django-ratings backend. But I haven't had a chance to figure that out yet. Anyway, hope this helps, Ethan 1 http://github.com/dcramer/django-ratings [2] http://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-ratings [3] http://www.fyneworks.com/jquery/star-rating/ [4] http://code.google.com/p/jquery-star-rating-plugin/ [5] http://pastebin.ca/1650596 [6] http://pastebin.ca/1650609 [7] http://pastebin.ca/1650616

Answer 2

There is a django-ratings app on PyPi. It can give you the rating as a percent 'myinstance.rating.get_percent()' to use in your template for the inner div width in the CSS trick you mentioned.