Consolidate rating mechanism

[jcfr]

The API associated with the rating module should allow to compute the average score on a list of items.

[zachmullen]

Ratings and comments can both be consolidated using a proxy item. This proxy item will be referenced by each instance of the extension that is uploaded, but ratings applied to the instance will actually be applied to the proxy item for aggregation. These items will be hidden from normal users and will allow for fast reads and writes of ratings and comments. It also allows for flexibility of how to define a distinct conceptual set of things that should be grouped together for the purpose of rating and commenting.

[jcfr]

@mwoehlke-kitware:

• This is low priority
• Check with @zachmullen if you have any question.

@zachmullen Is the proposed approach still the recommended way of solving this ?

[mwoehlke-kitware]

It seems like this sort of thing (also aggregated download statistics) ought to be done by changing the database schema to keep track of non-versioned extension information. Writing back changes is probably not difficult (just twiddle what table is written to). Reading can be done with a join query.

The "proxy item" sounds suspiciously like this already...

The main hiccup is that this is a schema change, and the main server would have to be taken offline long enough to build the table with the aggregated data (and probably to run a cold backup first). Once it's done though it would be much easier to simply drop old builds from the database without affecting the aggregate data.