HOWTO: Adding search to your rails application

how did you get it off of the site? I et tons and tons of errors when using copy and paste from just checking that files syntax

Ok I got an email asking how to build the search form for this. This is really quite simple and there a number of ways you can do it (including with AJAX). Anyway, here goes.

First, you'll need to add a search action to your controller. This could be like this:

def search
  if params[:query]
    @products = Product.search(params[:query])
  else
    @products = []
  end
end

<form action='/search'>
<input name="query" type="text" />
<input type='submit' value='Search' />
</form>

<% if @products.empty? %>
        <span>There were no results for your query</span><br/><br/>
<% else %>
<% for product in @products %>
Result: <% product.title %>
<% end %>
<% end %>

Last edited by daibatzu (2006-10-24 08:38:10)

paginating is pretty simple. Somewhere on the rails wiki I found someone had written a paginate_collection method. Add it to application.rb

  def paginate_collection(collection, options = {})
    default_options = {:per_page => 10, :page => 1}
    options = default_options.merge options
    
    pages = Paginator.new self, collection.size, options[:per_page], options[:page]
    first = pages.current.offset
    last = [first + options[:per_page], collection.size].min
    slice = collection[first...last]
    return [pages, slice]    
  end

def search
   if params[:query]
      product_collection = Product.search(params[:query])
   else
       product_collection = []
   end
   @product_pages, @products = paginate_collection product_collection, :page => params[:page]
end

<div class="paginate_controls">    
    <% if header %>
    Showing <%= @product_pages.current.first_item %>
       to <%= @product_pages.current.last_item %>
       of <%= @product_pages.item_count %><br/>
       <% end %>
          <%= link_to(h('< Previous'), {:page => @product_pages.current.previous})  + " | " if @product_pages.current.previous %>
   <%= pagination_links(@product_pages, :window_size => 4) %>
   <%= " | " + link_to(h('Next >'), {:page => @product_pages.current.next}) if @product_pages.current.next %>
</div>
<div class="search_results">
<% @products.each do |product|
   <%= product.name %>
<% end %>
</div>

Ok, I posted a tutorial on paginating search results (with semantically-meaningful labels, yet) at http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages … teSearches Let me know what you think.

Last edited by paron (2007-01-24 09:08:57)

In the tutorial, the model provides two methods, "search_name" and "search_all."

For what you're trying to do, I would just provide one search method -- "search_author". I suspect search is overkill for the other two conditions, "category" and "year".

There's probably no need to "search" categories; you already know what they are. It's more of a filter, where you might pass an argument like ":conditions=>["category = 'fiction']. It's the same with year; you really don't need to 'search' it -- you're just going to filter for "1987" or ">1994  AND <2004". You're not going to search in the "year" field for terms like "Einstein" AND "math", so it isn't a search, per se.

Anyway, once your model returns its array of results, you could paginate and semantically label the pages with author data, so that the results are neatly broken into pages labeled "Aaron to Byron", "Camille to Dante", etc.

If it's a multi-year search, you could label them with "Able, 1883 to Anderson, 1994" and "Astarte, 1776 to Ballinger, 1923" or the other way around, like: "1810, Pursley to 1850, Bedinger" and "1851, Sydney to 1876, Lincoln" depending on your ordering of the results.

Is that what you're asking?

Ron

Last edited by paron (2007-01-24 08:47:43)

RoR newb here,
In suggested search.rhtml I found it didn't display the results. Eventually I found I had to change
Result: <% product.title %>

into

Result: <%= product.title %>

hi all i hv tried out this tutorial but getting an error

-->"undefined method `search' for #<Class:0x467cd08>"

c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.1/lib/active_record/base.rb:1672:in `method_missing'
app/controllers/book_controller.rb:65:in `find'

I did everything below but I get the error 'No route matches for