CombiSearch

Use CombiSearch to add a 'global' search to your app. For example; if you have Books and Movies and you want a combined search where you search in all of your titles.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'combi_search'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install combi_search

This model is used to store your 'combined' search data. You can create it by running the following command in your rails console

CombiSearch.create_table

The best way to add it to a rails project however, is to create a migration for it... That migration could look like this.

class CreateCombiSearchEntries < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    say_with_time("Creating table for combi_search_entries") do
      CombiSearch.create_table
    end
  end

  def self.down
    say_with_time("Dropping table for combi_search_entries") do
      CombiSearch.drop_table
    end
  end
end

For every model you want to include in your global search you should call combi_search_scope with the name of the scope, the model's attributes you want to include for that scope, and an optional if condition.

Say you have a Book and a Movie model, and you want to search either on their titles, or all their text-contents; then your setup should look like this.

class Book < ActiveRecord::Base
  include CombiSearch
  combi_search_scope :titles, on: [:title]
  combi_search_scope :full_text, on: [:title, :author, :content]
end

class Movie < ActiveRecord::Base
  include CombiSearch
  combi_search_scope :titles, on: [:title]
  combi_search_scope :full_text, on: [:title, :director, :script_content]
end 

If you only want to include published books, when you search in the titles scope, then you should change your code like this.

  combi_search_scope :titles, on: => [:title], if: lambda { |book| book.published }

The search-index gets updated once your model is updated. To make sure your search-index is up-to-date when you add it for pre-existing models, you can run the following in your console:

# delete existing index
CombiSearch.remove_index

# Create index for Book's
Book.update_combi_search

# Create index for Movie's
Movie.update_combi_search

The best way again to do this for your rails project, is to create a migration for it... That migration could look like this.

class CreateCombiSearchEntries < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    say_with_time("Updating search index") do
      CombiSearch.remove_index
      Book.update_combi_search
      Movie.update_combi_search
    end
  end

  def self.down
    # there isn't a down migration for this....
  end
end

To find all Book's and Movie's where the :titles includes Harry Potter:

library_items = CombiSearch.scoped(:titles).search("Harry Potter")

To find all Book's and Movie's where the :full_text includes "Abacadabra":

library_items = CombiSearch.scoped(:full_text).search("Abacadabra")

This returns an ActiveRecord::Relation of CombiSearch::Entry models. They are not that interesting.... however they have a relation to an included searchable model which is the original (Book or Movie) model.

The following code:

	library_items = CombiSearch.scoped(:titles).search("Harry Potter")
	
	library_items.each { |item| 
		original = item.searchable
		if original.is_a?(Book)
			puts "We found a Book; and the title is: #{original.title}"
		end
		if original.is_a?(Movie)
			puts "We found a Movie; and the director is: #{original.director}"
		end
	}

Could output something like:

We found a Movie; and the director is: Chris Columbus
We found a Book; and the title is: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

After checking out the repo, run bundle exec rspec spec to run the tests.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release to create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/douweh/combi_search/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request