File: README — Documentation for rails-simple-search (1.2.0)

What is rails-simple-search?

rails-simple-search is a Ruby gem. It can help Ruby on Rails developers quickly implement searching/filtering function against database. If you're not looking for a full-text searching solution, this plugin will most probably satisfy all your searching requirement.

Why?

From time to time, I need to build pages to show a list of narrowed down records from a database table by giving some searching criteria on some columns of the table and/or of some referencing tables. Before I implemented this plugin, I usually do the searching in the following way:

Use <%= form_tag %> to build a form in the view
Get the searching criteria from the params hash individually in the controller and put them into instance variables to be used in view
Build the SQL WHERE clause and sometimes the JOIN clause according to the values from the form
Run the find(:all, :conditions => [xxxxxxxx], :joins => "xxxxxxxx") with the WHERE and JOIN clauses

After having used this pattern a few times, I realized I could DRY it to make future coding of this kind of searching much simpler. That's where the rails-simple-search plugin comes in.

Installation

Put the following line into the Gemfile of your project
```
gem 'rails-simple-search'
```
Install the gems in Gemfile
```
$ bundle install
```

Usage

Let's suppose we have models of User, Address, Post and Comment. User model has_one address, has_many posts, and has_many comments; Post model has_many comments; Comment model belongs_to an author(of model User). We'd like to search for users according to any combination of the following criteria:

part of the user's email addrsss
part of the first name or last name
range of the user's birth date
part of the city name of the user's address
state of the user's address
part of the name of any authors who commented the user's any posts

The following is how we implement this searching function with rails-simple-search:

Include gem into Gemfile
```
gem 'rails-simple-search'
```

Code in model (app/model/search.rb):

class Search < RailsSimpleSearch::Base
end

Code in controller:

@search = Search.new(User, params[:search])
@users = @search.run.order('email')

Code in views:

<% form_for @search, url => "/xxxxxx", data: {turbo: false} do |f| %>

  <%=f.label :email %>
  <%=f.text_field :email %>

  <%=f.label "first name or last name" %>
  <%=f.text_field "first_name_or_last_name" %>

  <%=f.label :from_birth_date %>
  <%=f.text_field :birth_date_greater_than_equal_to %>

  <%=f.label :to_birth_date %>
  <%=f.text_field :birth_date_less_than_equal_to %>

  <%=f.label :state%>
  <%=f.select "address.state_id", [['AL', 1], ...] %>  <!-- address is an association of model User -->

  <%=f.label :city %>
  <%=f.text_field "address.city" %>                    <!-- address is an association of model User -->

  <%=f.label "name of any one who commented to my posts" %>
  <%=f.text_field "posts.comments.user.first_name_or_posts.comments.user.last_name" %>
                                                       <!-- the associations could go even deeper, isn't it POWERFUL? -->

  <%=f.submit %>
<% end %>

<% @users.each do |user| %>
 <%= # show the attributes of user %>
<% end %>

Add route for the post to url "/xxxxxx" (config/route.rb)
```
post "/xxxxxx" => "yyyyyyy#zzzzzz"
```

Demo projects

There are 2 demo projects for this gem, one for Rails 5 and one for Rails 7. You are encouraged to clone them to your local and get a feel of the power of rails-simple-search.

Version history

For rails 2.x.x applications, you might want to use the version 0.9.0.

From version 0.9.1 to 0.9.7, Rails 3 is supported.

From version 0.9.8 on, this gem started to support Rails 4. Version 0.9.8 is tested under Rails 4.1.1, and version 0.9.9 fixed an issue under Rails 4.2.

From version 1.1.0 on, we started to support the "or" relation, e.g., we can use field like "first_name_or_last_name".

From version 1.1.3 on, we started to support Rails 5.