Agile Web Development

SimplySearchable is a search plugin created by SpinBits - http://spinbits.com.

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’.

i.e. /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 :with_pagination => {:per_page => X} (X is your preferred number of results per page) to simply_searchable calling line and you’re all set.

Owner: Rida Al Barazi

Home: http://code.spinbits.com/simply_searchable.html

Repository: svn://code.spinbits.com/plugins/simply_searchable/trunk

License: Rails' (MIT)

Category: Searching and Queries