Add option to Blog App, to show "more viewed" posts

Question

Actually, Blog post is a very nice app for 2sxc, but it should be great to be able to register every time a user opens a blog, and then have a module to show for example 5 more viewed posts.

Basically i need to know how to update a post field (views for example) every time a user opens or see details for that post

Thanks for your help

Answer 1

This is an interesting idea - let me give you some minimal guidance to keep things running well...

1. First of all I really recommend you do the counting in a separate item/entity. This is for performance reasons: when you update a blog-post, you are updating 20-30 fields, which just puts a lot of unnecessary pressure on the system. So create something like ViewCount with a property BlogPostId and Count
2. Now to update the count, I suggest you do two things
   1. Get the count and cache it somewhere
   2. Update the cache-count on each view
   3. Only update the server data every or 100 hits (just for performance, as I assume you expect a lot of views)

Here's some pseudo code to do this...

var postId = post.EntityId;
var cacheId = "PostCount" + postId;
var count = Application[cacheId] ?? -1;
if(count == -1) {
  // load the data
  var countStates = AsList(App.Data["ViewCount"]);
  var counter = countStates.FirstOrDefault(c => c.BlogPostId == postId);
  if(counter != null) {
    count = counter.Count;
  } else {
    count = 0;
  }
}

// increment
count++;

// save to cache
Application[cacheId] = count;

// every 10 counts update the count in the storage / sql
// on high load, increase this to 100 or 1000
if(count % 10 == 0) {
  // you'll have to figure this out yourself - see docs link below
  App.Data.Update(...);
}

for the saving, check out the docs here https://docs.2sxc.org/api/dot-net/ToSic.Eav.Apps.AppData.html#ToSic_Eav_Apps_AppData_Update_System_Int32_System_Collections_Generic_Dictionary_System_String_System_Object__System_String_