Design question in Ruby on Rails

Question

Ok the scenario is simple(?). I have say Articles , Reviews and Comments , three different models that a user can update. I was wondering what is the best design to follow if I want the updated records (from the user) to become available only to an administrator (and not in a public view) but at the same time the old ones remain as is until the admin reviews them.

First thought was that would be best to have self-referential joins, making a new record on the update action of the user and referencing the old one so that the admin when finishing the review the old record, the latter gets deleted and the reviewed one gets published. I seriously think that if there are many updates from users, then the table holding the data will grow BIG in a very short time. Do you have any other suggestion?

Thank a lot for the help :)

PS I am using Ruby on Rails framework, if that makes any different at all..

Answer 1

This kinda reminds me of Wordpress draft system and to be sincere, i think it's probably one of the few ways to do it. That is, have a column with post_type like [draft,published etc..]. Alternatively, you could have a drafts model alone and a published model that are polymorphic of the Article model. I think that you are right in your concerns about a table getting too big. Thus, i think that you would better choose a strategy of removing old drafts or archiving them in another table, so that they just occupy space and not mess with your search time for them (also, remember to use indexes for better performance).

Maybe act-as-state-machine can help as well ( http://www.practicalecommerce.com/blogs/post/122-Rails-Acts-As-State-Machine-Plugin )

Answer 2

One thing to keep in mind is that unless you're trying to create a detailed revision history, there are really only two versions of a given article, view or comment that you need to keep around: The current approved public version of the item and the current edited version of the item. So you can probably just story two copies, and copy the draft version into published and delete the draft when it's approved, or update it if the user makes additional changes before it's approved.