Tanker - IndexTank integration to your favorite orm

Note: This gem is still quite alpha but please feel free to send comments

IndexTank is a great search indexing service, this gem tries to make any orm keep in sync with indextank with ease. This gem has a simple but powerful approach to integrating IndexTank to any orm. The gem also supports pagination using the will_paginate/collection. Its dead simple to integrate with Rails 3 basically you just need to

There are very few things needed to integrate Tanker to any orm. Basically the orm instance must respond to id and any attributes you wish to index.

Installation

gem install tanker

If you are using Rails 3 its better to add Tanker to your GEMFILE

gem 'tanker'

And run

bundle install

Initialization

If you’re using Rails, config/initializers/tanker.rb is a good place for this:

Tanker.configuration = {:url => 'http://:[email protected]' }

You would probably want to have a fancier configuration depending on your environment. Be sure to copy and paste the correct url provided in the IndexTank Dashboard

Example

class Topic < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_taggable

  # just include the Tanker module
  include Tanker

  # define the index by supplying the index name and the fields to index
  tankit 'lgbt' do
    indexes :title
    indexes :content
    indexes :tag_list #NOTICE this is an array of Tags! Awesome!
  end

  # define the callbacks to update or delete the index
  # these methods can be called whenever or wherever
  # this varies between ORMs
  after_save :update_tank_indexes
  after_destroy :delete_tank_indexes

  # Note! Will Paginate pagination, thanks mislav!
  def self.per_page
    5
  end

end

Create Topics

Topic.create(:title => 'Awesome Topic', :content => 'blah, blah', :tag_list => 'tag1, tag2')
Topic.create(:title => 'Bad Topic', :content => 'blah, blah', :tag_list => 'tag1')
Topic.create(:title => 'Cool Topic', :content => 'blah, blah', :tag_list => 'tag3, tag2')

Search Topics

@topics = Topic.search_tank('Topic', :page => 1, :per_page => 10) # Gets 3 results!
@topics = Topic.search_tank('blah',  :conditions => {:tag_list => 'tag1'}) # Gets 2 results!
@topics = Topic.search_tank('blah',  :conditions => {:title => 'Awesome', :tag_list => 'tag1'}) # Gets 1 result!

Paginate Results

<% will_paginate(@topics) %>

TODO

Rake Tasks to update the index.
Documentation
More fancy stuff (Suggestions?)

Note on Patches/Pull Requests

Fork the project.
Make your feature addition or bug fix.
Add tests for it. This is important so I don’t break it in a future version unintentionally.
Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or history. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)
Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.

Acknowledgements

The gem is based on a couple of projects:

*redis-textsearch *mongomapper *thinkingtank *will_paginate

Kudos to this awesome projects and developers