A simple gem for adding a chainable search method to ActiveRecord::Base (rails 3)
To install, add this to your bundler Gemfile
gem 'search_for'
Next, go to the root of your project in a shell and run this command (you may need to use “sudo” depending on your environment):
λ bundle install
Suppose you’d like to create a simple quicksearch form for searching your Book database. We’ll assume your books have the following attributes: “title, author, description, genre”
If someone searches for “romance”, we’d like to it to return any books where the title, author, description, or genre matches “romance”
If someone searches for “space odyssey”, we want it to narrow results: now a column attribute matches only if that attributes contains both “Space” and “Odyssey”.
How does it work? Assuming our form posts a ‘query’ param, then we could do something like this in our controller:
Book.search_for params[:query], :on => [:title, :author, :description, :genre]
The sql generated would look something like this (assuming params = “space odyseey”):
Book.search_for(params[:query], :on => [:title, :author, :description, :genre]).to_sql # ==> # SELECT * FROM "books" WHERE ( # (title LIKE '%space%' AND title LIKE '%odyssey%') # OR (author LIKE '%space%' AND author LIKE '%odyssey%') # OR (description LIKE '%space%' AND description LIKE '%odyssey%') # OR (genre LIKE '%space%' AND genre LIKE '%odyssey%') # )