Adding a search field

Question

Would it be possible to add a search box where you could type like soccer, books, music, etc. to then generate a list of users that have the same interest? If so how would you go about doing this?

Answer 1 · 2014-04-15T15:32:44Z

April 15, 2014 3:32pm

For this specific example it could be achieved fairly easily by first adding a search field to your view that points to a search action in the users controller:

  <%= form_for :search, url: search_users_path do |form| %>
    <%= form.text_field :query %>
  <% end %>

Add a route for the actions:

  resources :users do
    collection do
      post :search
    end
  end

Then adding an action to the users controller that searches users by interest (assuming Interest has a field "name":

  def search
    @users = User.include(:interests)
                    .where('interests.name LIKE ?', "%#{params[:search][:query]%")
                    .uniq
    render :index
  end

This will do a partial text search of interest names submitted from the form and return all of the users which have this interested associated. If you'd like to be able to search for multiple interests at the same time you'll have to get a little fancier I'm afraid. Likewise if you plan on being able to search for users based on multiple fields you'll want to consider some full-text search options instead of writing the queries by hand. There are many options available for full-text search in rails, some of which will require other processes to be running to index the database.

Hopefully this helps for your needs though!

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Derek Saunders

Derek Saunders

Adding a search field

1 Answer

Geoff Parsons

Geoff Parsons