Display a record sequentially with every refresh

I have a Rails 3 application that currently shows a single "random" record with every refresh, however, it repeats records too often, or will never show a particular 开发者_StackOverflow中文版record. I was wondering what a good way would be to loop through each record and display them such that all get shown before any are repeated. I was thinking somehow using cookies or session_ids to sequentially loop through the record id's, but I'm not sure if that would work right, or exactly how to go about that.

The database consists of a single table with a single column, and currently only about 25 entries, but more will be added. ID's are generated automatically and are sequential.

Some suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks.

The funny thing about 'random' is that it doesn't usually feel random when you get the same answer twice in short succession.

The usual answer to this problem is to generate a queue of responses, and make sure when you add entries to the queue that they aren't already on the queue. This can either be a queue of entries that you will return to the user, or a queue of entries that you have already returned to the user. I like your idea of using the record ids, but with only 25 entries, that repeating loop will also be annoying. :)

You could keep track of the queue of previous entries in memcached if you've already got one deployed or you could stuff the queue into the session (it'll probably just be five or six integers, not too excessive data transfer) or the database.

I think I'd avoid the database, because it sure doesn't need to be persistent, it doesn't need to take database bandwidth or compute time, and using the database just to keep track of five or six integers seems silly. :)

UPDATE:

In one of your controllers (maybe ApplicationController), add something like this to a method that you run in a before_filter:

class ApplicationController <  ActionController::Base
    before_filter :find_quip
    def find_quip:
        last_quip_id = session[:quip_id] || Quips.find(:first).id
        new_quip_id = Quips.find(last_quip.id + 1).id || Quips.find(:first)
        session[:quip_id] = new_quip
    end
end

I'm not so happy with the code to wrap around when you run out of quips; it'll completely screw up if there is ever a hole in the sequence. Which is probably going to happen someday. And it will start on number 2. But I'm getting too tired to sort it out. :)

If there are only going to be not too many like you say, you could store the entire array of IDs as a session variable, with another variable for the current index, and loop through them sequentially, incrementing the index.