suggestions for Rails back-end workflow for cleaning up attachments to abandoned drafts?

Question

I'm working on a Rails application. Two of my models are notes and attachments. The user can create notes and add attachments to them. This is standard stuff and I already have this working fine.

Currently, the user must create a note before they can add attachments to it. I'm looking to implement a more streamlined workflow for the user, similar to the familiar email workflow where you can add attachments to an unsaved email. However, the key is that I don't want the user to even have to save a draft of the note before the attachment can be added, and I want this unsaved note to be abandoned if the user navigates away (I don't want to have the additional complexity of unsaved/unpublished notes).

I know that when the note hasn't initially been saved yet, I can create the attachments without the link to the note, and then establish the link when the note gets saved. The part I'm drawing a blank on is how do I remove the unused attachments if the user breaks off the note creation process? Is there a hook that I'm missing that allows me to see that the user broke off?

Without such a hook, the first solution that comes to mind is a nightly cleanup script that runs via cron that would find all of the unattached attachments and remove them (perhaps filtering by attachments that have been created more than 24 hours ago). Is this the best solution?

Answer 1

There really isn't any kind of trigger to let you know when to clean those up, since a user can just leave the site without "logging out" or some other action. So that leaves you with a background job not attached to user action. In your case I think a nightly cron is nice and simple and would fit this situation well.