Life is grand

RailsConf Europe 2006: Search with Rails

Now at the shopping.nouvelobs.com ecommerce talk which is a large news site in France. Speaker is Gwendal Rou, very French.

ModelSearch is an extension of find that allows something like this:

search = ProductSearch.new()
search.buyable = true
search.Find(:all)

The idea is that searching with multiple columns is not at the usual high-level in Rails. You have to use SQL.

ModelSearch is capable of; Televisions costing less than 300, sorted by price.

search = ProductSearch.new
search.keyword - 'television'
search.max_price = 300
search.sort = :price
search.find(:all)

That is quite handy. I assume ‘max_’ is dynamically added onto model members. i.e. I assume you could have min_price too. My assumption is nearly correct, you just need to set it up in the model a bit.

A further extension lets you pass the search object into the normal model find e.g. Product.find(:all, search.find_options)

ProductSearch is a class you subclass from ModelSearch and setup with various params. e.g. search_key :keyword, :search => :keyword, in => [:name, :description]

All nicely model based this. Buyable, from the first code, is a custom method in the ProductSearch model. It works well with a form, letting you just pass in properly named input fields.

ModelSearch is planned for release soon.

All in all a nice bit of code for real world problems.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 15th, 2006 at 12:16 pm and is filed under 2006, AAA, Conference, Event, Rails, Ruby on Rails, ecommerce, nouvelobs, railsconf, railsconf europe, search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.