Define a rating
A rating is a simple structure that is powerful in its flexibility. Its three core attributes are customizable, allowing a developer to tailor an application's rating system to its needs.
Design a resource reference
One core rating attribute is the resource reference, which identifies the resource to which the rating is applied. In the Optimizely Community API, resources are identified using the Reference class. The scheme applied to define these references is designed within your application. This lets a developer structure ratings to be conveniently identified, organized, and retrieved in the application.
When designing a scheme for representing references, consider the following:
- What are you rating? Are you rating a first-class object within your system, a class of objects, or a facet of an object? For example, you might rate a product, a variant, or the product's price. Design your reference scheme to accommodate intangibles like facets, which are not necessarily uniquely identifiable objects within the application.
- How will you retrieve your ratings? Do you intend to retrieve ratings individually or in batches? If you need to retrieve a batch of ratings for a category of resources, consider representing that organizational scheme within your resource references.
A URI or similar namespace scheme provides an ideal template for a reference. Consider the following sample reference scheme that might be applied to address the above considerations:
product://optimizely/{product-identifier}/{variant-identifier}/{facet-identifier}For information on References, including best practices, see References and IDs in Discover the platformDiscover the platform.
Design a rating scheme
The value of a rating is represented as a simple integer value. The value's significance is defined in your application.
- A simple 5-star scale might be represented by values 1-5
- A 5-star scale, allowing half-star ratings, might be represented by values 1-10
- A percentage-based scale might be represented by values 1-100
Anticipate the potential for future alterations to your rating scale. For example, your application currently requires a 5-star rating scale, but you anticipate a future need for more granular values. In such a situation, consider implementing that scale with the values 1-10 rather than 1-5, where an even integer within that range represents each whole star. This allows for the introduction of half-star ratings later without skewing the statistics for existing ratings.