Ability to override search

[kristyan]

It would be great if we could override the default search mechanic, to allow for a customized search on a per model bases. For example, one way to do this would be to have a config setting such as

config.model Cars do
  search_method :search
end

or globally for all models

RailsAdmin.search_with_method :search 

This would mean in the case of the Car model, searches would be performed by calling:

Car.search query, offset, limit 

dynamically in preference to the default search. This would of course return a list of Car models which would be understood by rails admin and rendered in the search results.

This would be a very powerful feature as it would allow users to customize searches and potentially use search indexers such as Sphinx/Solr etc.. to perform the actual search in the background.

I would like to hear other any other comments/suggestions ?

[ogennadi]

+1

This would also be helpful in large databases for searching by id.

[billmccord]

+1 - I'm already running out of memory for some large datasets on Heroku that are put into drop-down boxes by default.

[nthj]

+1 — using rails_admin as a contacts database, and it's brilliant, right out of the box. Only searching across associations is slow.

[kkxlkkxllb]

need custom search to filter result from mongodb data type Array

[abevoelker]

Big +1 on this. I love that there is a search function out of the box for every model, but I already have ElasticSearch indexing a few of my models so for them I would prefer to search using the tire gem's functions.

[Hungor]

Big +1 on this too.

[a-vakulenko]

Big +1 too!

[willybaer]

Hi there,
had the same problem that I needed a custom search action, cause we have over 6 Mil. Entries and we needed a Sunspot:Solr search for that.

My solution:
Add to the bottom of rails_admin.rb

 # /config/initializers/rails_admin.rb

RailsAdmin::MainController.class_eval do

# Override the list_entries method of the RailsAdmin::MainController
  def list_entries(model_config = @model_config, auth_scope_key = :index, additional_scope = get_association_scope_from_params, pagination = !(params[:associated_collection] || params[:all] || params[:bulk_ids]))
    scope = model_config.abstract_model.scoped
    if auth_scope = @authorization_adapter && @authorization_adapter.query(auth_scope_key, model_config.abstract_model)
      scope = scope.merge(auth_scope)
    end
    scope = scope.instance_eval(&additional_scope) if additional_scope
    if params[:query].present? and model_config.abstract_model.is_a?(YOUR_MODEL).inspect
      solr_search(model_config, scope, pagination)
    else
      get_collection(model_config, scope, pagination)
    end
  end

#Custom query if params[:query] is set and the model ist YOUR MODEL
  def solr_search(model_config, scope, pagination)

    search_term = ""
    params[:query].gsub(/[_\?\*\~\"]/, '').split(' ').each do |word|
      search_term += word + " "
    end
    search_term

    search = YOUR_MODEL.search do
      fulltext search_term, :fields => [:your_field]
      paginate :page => 1, :per_page => (params[:per] || model_config.list.items_per_page)
    end
    results = []
    search.each_hit_with_result do |hit, YOUR_MODEL|
      results.push YOUR_MODEL
    end
    return results
  end

Hope it helps someone to boost the search action of rails_admin.