SearchLogic Just Seems … Logical …

Posted at July 10, 2009

I hate searching records. It drives me insane to build up crazy conditions to pass to ActiveRecord. I’ve used numerous plugins, but they’re either all clunky, lack certain search functionality, or flat out don’t work well. I was happy to hear about the new SearchLogic gem for searching records. I decided today, being Friday and all, that I would take some time to investigate it.

The idea of chaining is common, but what caught my attention is passing a hash of search criteria to search. In my situation, I wanted to test out filtering by state, since I use rubyist-aasm, as well as filtering by letter.

Here is the HAML view.

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%p Filter results by:
%p
State:
= link_to 'All', admin_users_path
== | #{link_to 'Active', admin_users_path(:state => :active)}
== | #{link_to 'Inactive', admin_users_path(:state => :inactive)}

%p
Login:
= link_to 'All', admin_users_path
- ("A".."Z").to_a.each do |l|
== | #{link_to l, admin_users_path(:l => l)}

Now is the best part, the index action for the Users controller, with will_paginate plugged in:

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def index
opts = {}
opts[:login_begins_with] = params[:l] if params[:l]
opts[:state_equals] = params[:state] if params[:state]
@search = User.search(opts)
@users = @search.paginate(:page => params[:page], :per_page => 25)
end

It has dynamic finders, plugs in with your current named_scopes and more; It doesn’t get much simpler than this.