Hi Nick,
This in fact was also something I came up with. I ditched it because,
like you said, it requires to update all the descendants. Which means
a lot of extra overhead. Not only the direct descendants, but all the
descendants. So a top comment could easily be replied more than 20
times, and each of those other 20, etc. etc. This would mean that I
would have to update more than 50 documents each time a user clicks on
the "upvote" button - not to mention the conflicts.
Isn't there a better way?
On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 2:43 PM, Nick North <nort...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I may be misunderstanding the problem, but would it work if you represent
> each comment by a list of its score and its id? Say comments 1, 2, 3, 4
> have scores 40, 30, 20, 10 respectively, then the documents would become:
>
> { _id: 1, path: [[40,"1"]] },
> { _id: 2, path: [[40,"1"], [30,"2"]] },
> { _id: 3, path: [[40,"1"], [30,"2"], [20,"3"]] }
> { _id: 4, path: [[40,"1"], [10,"4"]] }
> Then indexing on the path will now put comment 4 before comment 2. If two
> comments with the same parent have the same score, they will be ordered by
> id. If you want the date in the ordering, that's just another element in
> the list.
> The problem with this is that any change to the score of a parent comment
> requires the paths of all its descendants to be updated. But it feels as if
> that might be inevitable, as changing the parent score may move an entire
> subtree around in the ordering so the index of all elements of the subtree
> must change.
>
> Nick
>
> On 16 May 2012 12:27, Luca Matteis <lmatt...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I know how the ranking works actually. I described how I'd like to
>> concentrate on simply ranking each level by its points.
>> The issue is actually in the adapting this structure to Couch.
>>
>> On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 12:26 PM, Tim McNamara
>> <paperl...@timmcnamara.co.nz> wrote:
>> > It may be worth looking at the reddit source code (
>> github.com/reddit/reddit)
>> > to get some tips. Then you could adapt this into Couch.
>> > On May 16, 2012 9:41 PM, "Luca Matteis" <lmatt...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >> I'm trying to implement a basic way of displaying comments in the way
>> >> that Hacker News provides, using CouchDB. Not only ordered
>> >> hierarchically, but also, each level of the tree should be ordered by
>> >> a "points" variable. If you're familiar with sites such as Hacker News
>> >> or Reddit you know that each level of the comment tree is ordered by
>> >> the amount of points and also the date they were posted - however, for
>> >> sake of simplicity I'll just talk about a "points" variable.
>> >>
>> >> The idea is that I want a view to return it in the order I except, and
>> >> not make many Ajax calls for example, to retrieve them and make them
>> >> look like they're ordered correctly.
>> >>
>> >> This is what I got so far: Each document is a "comment". Each comment
>> >> has a property `path` which is an ordered list containing all its
>> >> parents. So for example, imagine I have 4 comments (with _id `1`, `2`,
>> >> `3` and `4`). Comment `2` is children of `1`, comment `3` is children
>> >> of `2`, and comment `4` is also children of `1`. This is what the data
>> >> would look like:
>> >>
>> >> { _id: 1, path: ["1"] },
>> >> { _id: 2, path: ["1", "2"] },
>> >> { _id: 3, path: ["1", "2", "3"] }
>> >> { _id: 4, path: ["1", "4"] }
>> >>
>> >> This works quite well for the hierarchy. A simple `view` will already
>> >> return things ordered with each comment underneath the correct one.
>> >>
>> >> The issue comes when I want to order each "level" of the tree
>> >> independently. So for example documents `2` and `4` belong to the same
>> >> branch, but are ordered, on that level, by their ID. Instead I want
>> >> them ordered based on a "points" variable that I want to add to the
>> >> path - but can't seem to understand where I could be adding this
>> >> variable for it to work the way I want it.
>> >>
>> >> Is there a way to do this? Consider that the "points" variable will
>> >> change in time.
>> >>
>> >> Thank you,
>> >> Luca
>> >>
>>
