Scoped search

The scoped_search Rails plugin makes it easy to search your ActiveRecord models. Searching is performed using a query string, which should be passed to the named_scope search_for. Based on a definition in what fields to look, it will build query conditions and return those as a named scope.

Scoped search is great if you want to offer a simple search box to your users and build a query based on the search string they enter. If you want to build a more complex search form with multiple fields, searchlogic (see github.com/binarylogic/searchlogic) may be a good choice for you.

Installing

The recommended method to enable scoped_search in your project is adding the scoped_search gem to your environment. Add the following code to your Rails configuration in config/environment.rb:

  Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
    ...
    config.gem 'wvanbergen-scoped_search', :lib => 'scoped_search',
                   :source => 'http://gems.github.com/'
  end

Run sudo rake gems:install to install the gem.

Alternatively, install scoped_search as a Rails plugin:

  script/plugin install git://github.com/wvanbergen/scoped_search.git

Usage

Scoped search requires you to define the fields you want to search in:

  class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    scoped_search :on => [:first_name, :last_name]
  end

For more information about options and using fields from relations, see the project wiki on search definitions: wiki.github.com/wvanbergen/scoped_search/search-definition

Now, the search_for scope is available for queries. You should pass a query string to the scope. This can be empty or nil, in which case all no search conditions are set (and all records will be returned).

  User.search_for('my search string').each { |user| ... }

The result is returned as named_scope. Because of this, you can actually chain the call with other scopes, or with will_paginate. An example:

  class Project < ActiveRecord::Base
    searchable_on :name, :description
    named_scope :public, :conditions => {:public => true }
  end

  # using chained named_scopes and will_paginate in your controller
  Project.public.search_for(params[:q]).paginate(:page => params[:page], :include => :tasks)

More information about usage can be found in the project wiki: wiki.github.com/wvanbergen/scoped_search/usage

Query language

The search query language is simple, but supports several constructs to support more complex queries:

A complex query example to look for Ruby on Rails programmers without cobol experience, over 18 years old, with a recently updated record and a non-lame nickname:

  ("Ruby" OR "Rails") -cobol, age >= 18, updated_at > 2009-01-01 && nickname !~ l33t

For more info, see the the project wiki: wiki.github.com/wvanbergen/scoped_search/query-language

Additional resources

• Source code: github.com/wvanbergen/scoped_search/tree/master
• Project wiki: wiki.github.com/wvanbergen/scoped_search
• RDoc documentation: wvanbergen.github.com/scoped_search
• wvanbergen’s blog posts: techblog.floorplanner.com/tag/scoped_search

License

This plugin is released under the MIT license. Please contact weshays (github.com/weshays) or wvanbergen (github.com/wvanbergen) for any questions.