Notes from a Messy Desk

Any thoughts about extending this to also search by foreign key objects? As a concrete example, I have a Business model that has a foreign key to an Address, and I want to be able to find all of a certain kind of business within 10 miles of me.

How would I specify that certain search parameters apply to the foreign key model?

Nice!

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p>
I added this little helper to your form_helper.rb which (I hope) encapsulates the expected naming conventions for search field (and remembers their values)

        def search_field_for(model, field, options = {})
          text_field_tag "#{model}[#{field}]", params[model].nil? ? nil : params[model][field]
        end

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p>
I'm having issues with

will_paginate

though - it's making a bit of a mess of the search parameters in the navigation links, losing rather than quoting the special characters. Is it something I'm doing wrong?

Oops, messed the formatting up a bit there. I think I'm encountering the same problem you referred to previously in
http://woss.name/2007/01/14/correct-route-generation-for-params-which-are-hashes/

Did you find a solution?

@Toby
I haven't tried this plugin yet, but if all the params are nested under the model name (model[x], model[y]), you can get at all of them by just doing:
find(:first, :conditions => params[:model])

Is that what you were talking about?

@Richie - The trouble I was having was that when using ActiveResource (i.e., the client API for REST web services) if I called:

Resource.find(:all, :params => {:key => :val})

it would generate a request to the application with the url:

GET http://server.com/resource?key=val

But resource_search would expect the parameter has to contain model[key] rather than just key.

I wanted to know a way of making this plugin work regardless of the format of the query string or the POST parameters.

I hope that makes more sense.

Toby

Hi Graeme. I was looking at this plugin today. Very nice. It is exactly the kind of thing I wanted to do on models in my application. In reading the comments and in using it I noted that you have to prefix the key/val with the model name. I have a little hack to let you do it this way or the ARes way that Toby mentions above.

Before I clean it up (it isn't much), are you still using/maintaining/accepting patches for this plugin?

Thanks for your hard work.
Don

Don: I am about to refactor the plugin with a number of improvements I've been needing for another project. Please do send your patch to me and I'll make sure it's incorporated. :-)

Neat plugin. For determining the model names from the controller, you might want to look at how the resource_controller plugin handles it. It opionally lets you specificy a different model from the one derived from the controller name, too.

For the SQL, you might want to look at the squirrel plugin just for fun. It's a neat plugin to Rubyize the conditions for AR#find. You can obtain just the SQL by using it with Model.find(:query) do foo == 'bar' end.conditions.to_sql

Thanks!

I know this plugin is more intended as a one-shot deal to allow for searching a model, but it might be nice to be able to override the SQL and produce a more crafted query per model. I added the followingly quickly:

My model (using squirrel plugin for SQL):

def self.search_scope_conditions(params={})
return nil if params.blank?
self.find(:query) do
last == params[:last]
end.conditions.to_sql
end

model.rb:

def with_search_terms(params)
conditions = search_scope_conditions(params)
with_scope :find => {:conditions => conditions} do
yield
end
end

Maybe I should make it accept a block or a symbol.

Just a thought.