SimplySearchable

SimplySearchable is a search plugin created by SpinBits.

The main goal of SimplySearchable is to help you create a clean url to search in your controller and model.

This plugin adds a method to the controller named “search” that will find and filter the model data smartly from the search fields defined in its calling line

SimplySearchable recognizes three types of filters:

  1. Exact values: like the title in the example above (acts_as_ferret implementation to come soon)
  2. Belongs to associations: for those fields that ends with _id, like author_id in the example above
  3. Has many association: for those fields that are in plural form, like comments in the example above

Generator

generators will create a simple search view ‘search.html.erb’ which has a very basic table with your results in the views folder of your simply searchable controller.

Example

In your controller:

simply_searchable :fields => [‘title’, ‘author_id’, 
‘comments’], 
													
:order  => ‘created_at DESC’

This will create a search method that search any text given to be the ‘title’, and search the belongs_to association with ‘authors’ and finally the has_many association with ‘comments’.

 /posts/search?author_id=1&comments[]=1&comments[]=3

This url will search posts from the author with id 1 AND has comments with ids 1 and 3

Quick installation

Let’s say you have a Post model and PostsController and you want to search by author and comments:

  1. Install the plugin:

    ./script/plugin install 
svn://code.spinbits.com/plugins/simply_searchable/trunk

  2. In your PostsController add:


    simply_searchable :fields => [‘title’, ‘author_id’, 
‘comments’]

  3. In your routes.rb add search method to your desired resource:

    map.resources :posts, :collection => {:search => :get}

  4. Generate the search results page that shows the post’s title and body:

    ./script/generate simply_searchable Post title body

  5. visit /posts/search and start passing your filters:

    /posts/search?author_id=1 # View posts from author 1
    
												
/posts/search?title=”test” # View posts with the title ‘test’
    
												
/posts/search?comments=1&author_id=3 # View posts that has comment 1 and written by 
author 3
    
												
/posts/search?author_id[]=1&author_id[]=2 # View posts from both authors 1 and 
2

Integrations

This plugin has integrations with will_paginate:

 ./script/plugin install 
svn://errtheblog.com/svn/plugins/will_paginate

To integrate will_paginate just pass the following to simply_searchable calling line and you’re all set.:

 :with_pagination => {:per_page => X}

X is your preferred number of results per page,

TODO

  • Launch the acts_as_ferret integration.
  • Move most of the logic to the model instead of the controller.
  • Enhance the generated view and add a couple more partials.
  • Have some sort of callbacks before and after the search method