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SHARED REVIEWS / RATING ATTRIBUTES
Shared vs Non-Shared Reviews
When it comes to selecting a set of rating attributes for each category (of audio and video files that share a given musical genre) or yellowpage (of bands located in a particular region of the country) Mike has the option of going with a different set of rating attributes for each category or yellowpage, or he can make life simpler and use a common set. The steps involved in creating rating attributes have been discussed in detail in the section on ADDING RATING TYPES in Tutorial Three: How To Create A Graphic Artist Gallery, so refer to that section to learn how to create your own attributes which may then be assigned to categories and yellowpages.
As mentioned at the beginning of this tutorial, in Example Audio/Video Download Venue, reviews that are submitted to a given category or yellowpage cannot be displayed in any other category or yellowpage which also contains the reviewed "thing" unless that category or yellowpage happens to characterized by the same set of rating attributes.
In fact, the implementation in Red Queen is more strict than this. Reviews can only be shared if EVERY category or yellowpage shares the same set of rating attributes (though you can have Shared Reviews in one branch, say Items, and non-Shared Reviews in another if you like). If Mike was to decide to assign different sets of rating attributes to the various categories or yellowpages he would go about it in the way described in the section on CREATING RATING TEMPLATES in Tutorial Three: How To Create A Graphic Artist Gallery.
Instead, we suppose here that Mike opts to use one common set of rating attributes for all categories and, another common set for all yellowpages. There is a good reason for using a common set for the suppliers (bands). The reason is that each yellowpage represents a location in the country and generally has no influence on the kind of music a band focuses on, so the rating attributes describing a band need to be generic, as equally applicable to a band from the U.S. Mid West as to one from the East Coast.
Mike could assign the same set of rating attributes to each State-level yellowpage, and sub-regions would inherit their rating attributes from the State-level yellowpage above them. But there are 52 States to deal with. The easier option is just to create a single set of rating attributes and specify that Shared Reviews should be used for all yellowpages. When we do that, we do not even have to assign the set of rating attributes to any yellowpage--it is done automatically for us.
Now, you might well be thinking "Wait a minute. Why use Shared Reviews when we know that a band is only going to appear in a single yellowpage--namely the one representing their home region? We don't need Shared Reviews, do we?"
Well, that's absolutely true. Any review submitted for that band will only appear in the one yellowpage associated with the band. But there is also nothing to stop us using the Shared Reviews mechanism if it happens to be useful, which it is here (since we can assign rating attributes just once, instead of 52 times).
Creating A Set Of Shared Rating Attributes
To assign a set of common rating attributes Mike goes to the Configure > Shared Reviews page in the administrative area of Red Queen. On that page Mike will find a separate section for each of the Category/Item, Team/Member, and Yellowpage/Supplier branches. If rating attributes have already been created (see ADDING RATING TYPES in Tutorial Three: How To Create A Graphic Artist Gallery if you are unsure about how this is done) then the Yellowpage/Supplier section will offer a form to select the common rating attributes to use for our Shared Supplier Reviews. The form will look something like this:
You can see that it consists of a left hand menu of available rating attributes, and an empty right hand menu into which rating attributes can be transferred. You will also notice a number next to each attribute representing the rating scale associated with the attribute. You can only transfer attributes of the same rating scale, since a common set of attributes will share that same rating scale. Once you put a 5 star rating scale attribute into the right menu you will only be able to add other 5 star rating scale attributes.
When you have assembled your common set of attributes, save the results using the submit button at the bottom of the page. Once you have done this you will see a NEW section appear on the page under the form shown above. Supposing that Mike had elected to use all 4 of the rating attributes shown above, the new form elements would look something like this (depending on how the rating attributes were defined):
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What are the options shown here?
They determine whether or not a listing of suppliers (bands on a yellowpage) can be ordered according to the average values of the selected attributes. Mike makes his sorting selections and clicks on the submit button once again to save his final results for the Shared Reviews configuration. Now every yellowpage will make use of these 4 rating attributes when somebody decides to review a band.
In the next section we look at how Mike will populate his Yellow Page branch with bands, ninety-nine percent of which he is not aware. And we will see the same approach is used for populaing the Item table, which represents individual audio and video tracks.
Next Section: ADDING SUPPLIERS (ARTISTS/BANDS)
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