BigIndex

A Rails plugin that drops into models and provides indexing functionality. Uses an adapter/repository pattern inspired by Datamapper to abstract the actual indexer used in the background, and exposes the model to a simple indexing API.

This should be used in conjunction with BigRecord in order to provide a more complete ORM.

Supported search servers

Solr
Sphinx (planned)

Installation

(1) Download and install Solr. Take a note of the url that solr is running on.

(2) In your Rails application, add Bigindex as a gem to your config/environment.rb file:

config.gem "bigindex", :source => "http://gemcutter.org"

and run the following rake task to install all the gems listed for your Rails app:

[sudo] rake gems:install

(3) Bootstrap Bigindex into your Rails application:

script/generate bigindex

(4) Modify the config file config/bigindex.yml to correspond to your Solr server.

Getting Started

Modify your Ruby class/model similarly to the following:

class Model < BigRecord::Base
  include BigIndex::Resource                    # 1. Include the BigIndex::Resource module into your model.

  column :name, :string
  column :description, :text

  index :name,  :string                         # 2. Define each attribute you want to index along with its type.
  index :description                            # Defaults to type :text
end

BigIndex will then override the default Model.find() method to pass through the indexer first. Model.find() will also accept the option => true, which bypasses the indexed #find method and dispatches it to the original Model.find() method, e.g. Model.find(:all, :bypass_index => true). Alternatively, you can use Model.find_without_index(:all) for the same functionality.

License

Bigindex is released under the MIT license.

Contributions