Searching on model and related attributes

Rails
1

Hi all,

Haven’t played with rails for a while so I’m a little stuck. I’ve got to
make a search functionality across models.

Let me try to explain this (sorry for lack of clarity, I’ve been reading
so many search gems etc that I’m a little fuzzy now):

  • Stores have town and county fields
  • Stores has_many Products which each have their own name and level

Users need to be able to find all Stores (possibily limited by town or
county) which have one or more Products identified by name AND a minimum
level.

So I might search for Stores which have the Product ‘Small Wooden Table’
with a level of at least 4 AND have the Product ‘Oak Table’ at least
level 10. Then I might restrict that to Stores in the county of
‘Yorkshire’.

The list of Products is pretty long (300+) and I don’t think it would be
user friendly to put them in a long drop-down list, so I’m tempted to
let users type in the name and level manually. If they don’t type the
name correctly, then I guess they won’t get the right results.

I’ve looked at several gems (including searchlogic and ransack) but none
seem to give me the ability to search related models in this way. I
might have to knock together something from scratch but I don’t want to
end up being hideously inefficient.

Grateful for any pointers on this, and please let me know if I haven’t
explained it well enough. I should add that I might be tempted to use
some sort of ajax for this (maybe for adding new product fields to the
form, or for autocomplete) but since my days with rails 2.x, ajax seems
to have gotten a lot more complicated to use.

Many thanks

2

On Jun 16, 2:43pm, Matt H. [email protected] wrote:

user friendly to put them in a long drop-down list, so I’m tempted to
let users type in the name and level manually. If they don’t type the
name correctly, then I guess they won’t get the right results.

How big is your data. If you’ve only got a couple of hundred stores to
go with those products then something like

Select * from stores
Inner join products_stores on store_id = stores.id
Inner join products on products.id = product_id
Where products.name = ‘small wooden table’ and level > 4 and location
= “yorkshire”

Should work. You could loosen the condition on name to make it more
user friendly (in which case you might want to chuck a ‘distinct’ in)
or provide an autocomplete for the product name.

Beyond a certain point you might fid it better to go for a full blown
searchengine like elasticsearch which would make the product name
searching bit more powerful while still remaining fast with large
amounts of data

Fred