How to put Ratings or Reviews on your Things
Since Querki is all about keeping track of Things, you often want to say how much you like those Things. This is where Ratings and Reviews come in.
A Rating is simply an opinion about how good something is, from 1 to 5 stars. A Review is a Rating, plus a box where you can add comments. You usually use one or the other, depending on whether you want that comment box.
Ratings and Reviews are both "User Value Properties", which means that each user of your Space gets to give their own individual opinion, without stepping on everyone else. This lets all the Members of your Space work together, to decide how much they like something.
Rating and Review are both built-in Querki Properties, so if you don't need to do anything fancy, adding them is a snap:
- Edit the Model that you want to be able to rate the instances of.
- At the bottom of the Editor, press the "Add a Property" button.
- From the "Choose a Property..." drop-down, pick Rating or Review, and press the "Add" button.
- Somewhere in the Model's Default View, say
[[Rating._edit]] or [[Review._edit]] -- at that location, Querki will put the input that lets you add or edit your own Rating or Review.
- Press the "Done" button.
That's all you need to do -- at that point, folks can begin to give their opinions.
Summaries
Displaying the Ratings for all of the members is handled through the "Rating Summary" property. You don't have to add this yourself; Querki will add it for you when people begin to add their Ratings or Reviews. (Rating Summary works regardless of whether you are using the Rating or Review property.)
To display a bar chart that shows how many people said each number (from 1 to 5 stars), just edit your Model, and somewhere in the Default View put [[Rating Summary]]. To show the average of what everyone voted, say [[Rating Summary -> _average]].
Advanced Usage
The Rating and Review properties are deliberately simple, to make them easy to use. However, they are a bit limited, and advanced users may want to roll their own properties instead. Doing your own allows you to:
- Have more than one Rating and/or Review per Model.
- Change the label for each star.
- Display the label for the star you are over somewhere else.
- Change the number of stars.
- Include other fields in a Review.
- Change the layout of a Review.
And so on: the mechanism is very general, and you can build all sorts of things with it. But at the moment it is
quite complicated, so it is only recommended for those who are comfortable getting their hands dirty. You can find the full details in
How to Customize Ratings and Reviews.
