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L.O.T.U.S.¶ ↑

Lotus is designed to be a powerful, flexible searching utility. It does however, take significant setup, due to the nature of trying to build a search tool to cover everything. In particular, you will need to configure what “resources” you want Lotus to be able to search, and how to translate the search terms into MySQL queries.

Initializer Config¶ ↑

Lotus.configure do |config|
  config.resource :job_offer do |u|
    u.default_operators = {:like => "Like", :fulltext => "Contains", :is => "Is"}     

    u.add_criterion :emplid, :display => "Employee ID", :operators => {:is => "Is"}
    u.add_criterion :name
    u.add_criterion :position_nbr, :display => "Position Number"
    u.add_criterion :is_active, :display => "Active", :operators => {:is => "Is"}, :type => :boolean
    u.add_criterion :department, :display => "Department"
    u.add_criterion :all, :display => "Anything", :operators => {:fulltext => "Contains"}
  end
end

Controller Usage¶ ↑

def search
  @c = YourCondition.from_params(params[:lotus])
  original_condition = YourCondition.from_params(params[:lotus])
  YourCondition.translate_fields(@c)
  if(original_condition.column_scope.include?("department"))
    @results = YourModel.find(:all, :conditions => @c.to_sql, :include => :department)
  else
    @results = YourModel.find(:all, :conditions => @c.to_sql)
  end
end

Setting Up Your Condition¶ ↑

Your custom Condition will do the mapping from your criterion names to database fields and the mapping from your operator names to MySQL operators. Also, if you wish to modify the values of the search (like adding wildcards), you should do that here, as well.

An example custom Condition would be as follows:

class YourCondition < Lotus::Condition
  # Here you translate the criteria from the initializer into the MySQL equivalents...
  #
  def self.translate_fields(condition)
    #recursively traverse the condition, for nested conditions
    unless condition.conditions.blank?      
      condition.conditions.each do |c|   
        translate_fields(c)
      end
    else
      if(condition.col_name == "all")
        condition.col_name = "search_cache"
      elsif condition.col_name == "department"
        condition.col_name = "departments.department_name"
      end

      # Add wilcards
      if(condition.col_operator == 'like')
        condition.col_value += "%"
      elsif(condition.col_operator == "fulltext")
        condition.col_value = condition.col_value.split().map {|x| "+{x}*"}.join(" ")
      end

      # Change Operators
      condition.col_operator = self.change_operator(condition.col_operator)         
    end

    def self.change_operator(op)
      translations = { 
        :ntlike => "NOT LIKE",
        :like   => "LIKE",
        :is     => "=",
        :not    => "!=",
        :gt     => ">",
        :lt     => "<",
        :fulltext   => :full 
      }
     return translations[operator.to_sym] if translations.keys.include?(operator.to_sym)
     raise Lotus::OperatorNotFound.new("#{operator} is not a valid operator")
   end
 end

End Usage¶ ↑

<% lotus_form(:job_offer, '/search') do %>
  <%= text_field :something, :special %>
  <%= lotus %>
  <%= submit_tag("Search!") %>
<% end %>