Ruby On Rails Interview Questions and Answers

Question: What is Sweeper in Ruby on Rails?

Sometimes you want to have control over how often and when the cache expires. 

Sometimes it is a good idea to have the system determine that on a logical basis. Say you have a list of product on your site and you want to reload the cache each time a new product is added/updated/deleted, then you can achieve this by using the sweeper. 

class ProductSweeper < ActionController::Caching::Sweeper
  OBSERVE PRODUCT# This sweeper is going to keep an eye on the Product model 
  # If our sweeper detects that a Product was created call this
  def after_create(product)
    expire_cache_for(product)
  end
  # If our sweeper detects that a Product was updated call this
  def after_update(product)
    expire_cache_for(product)
  end
  # If our sweeper detects that a Product was deleted call this
  def after_destroy(product)
    expire_cache_for(product)
  end
  private
  def expire_cache_for(product)
    # Expire the index page now that we added a new product
    expire_page(:controller => 'products', :action => 'index')
    # Expire a fragment
    expire_fragment('all_available_products')
  end
end