Ability to validate search string without making query

[bpatram]

Is there a way to validate a search string/query for a specific search scope?

For example if I have a search_scope of the following:

# my_model.rb MyModel
search_scope :search do
  attributes :value # value is an integer attribute type (not string)
  options :value, default: true
end

It would be nice to be able to call something like MyModel.validate_search("value:Foo") which would not actually make a query to the database but either raise an error (like theIncompatibleDatatype error) or return a boolean value.

This would allow us to validate/verify queries before being run and handle errors rather than silently failing when calling search("value:Foo") as it does now. The unsafe_search method is nice, but if there was a way to separate validation from querying that would be great.

My primary reason for this request is to better handle errors when using custom filters in the jsonapi_resources gem which has a custom verify method.

[bpatram]

After digging into the code this may seem fairly trivial to add to the SearchCop module as another ClassMethod. Unfortunately I don't think I'll have the time to make a proper PR this weekend.

# raises an error or returns the query
def validate_search_scope(query, scope_name)
  QueryBuilder.new(self, query, search_scopes[scope_name])
  query
end

[mrkamel]

sounds reasonable, i'll take a look at it asap.

[mrkamel]

Well, you actually can simply do MyModel.unsafe_search("query").to_sql or MyModel.unsafe_search("query"). As SearchCop returns an AR::Relation the query of course gets lazily evaluated. So i'm not sure adding validate_search_cop! provides much benefit.