Tech Blog

After an almost complete rewrite, I am proud to present version 2.0 of scoped_search, the ActiveRecord plugin that makes it easy to find records using a simple query language. This new version support a new query language that supports more complex constructs, and can therefore be used to conduct more fine-grained queries on your models.

New query language

• Logical operators: AND (&, &&), OR (|, ||) and NOT (!, -) operators, and parentheses to structure the boolean logic: police AND (car || uniform), -"village people". By default, the AND operator is used to combine different segments of your query.
• Comparison operators: the most common comparison operators are supported, and to what you expect on integer and date field.
• Explicit field support: only search in the specified field instead of all fields: age >= 21, created < 2009-01-01, username != "root".
• Check for NULL fields: null? parent, set? error_message
• Commas are supported to separate the different parts of the query.

More information about the query language can be found in the project wiki on GitHub.

New definition syntax

The new version supports a new syntax to define what fields of your model can be searched and in what cases. An example:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base   
  belongs_to :account_type
 
  scoped_search :on => [:first_name, :last_name]
  scoped_search :on => :created_at, :alias => :created, :only_explicit => true
  scoped_search :in => :account_type, :on => [:name, :description]
end

After the fields have been defined, the search_for method can be used to search your models using a named scope, just like it was before. The project wiki has more information about this new syntax. The search syntax itself hasn’t changed:

@users = User.search_for(params[:q]).paginate(page => params[:page])

Installation or upgrade

Include the gem in your environment.rb configuration and run rake gems:install to install it:

config.gem 'scoped_search', :source => 'http://gemcutter.org'

Backwards compatibility

The new version has a new syntax to define the fields that can be searched with a query. This new syntax gives you more fine-grained control over the queries that will be generated, so I urge you to adopt this new syntax. However, the old searchable_on syntax is still available for backwards compatibility.

Please contact me if you have any issues with the new version.

(Updated with new gemcutter installation instructions.)