Prototyping a site in Ruby on Rails and need to add a simple search feature in less than 5 minutes?

Note: This should be for smaller projects because I'll be using regular SQL queries for searching. If you're looking for something more advanced, try thinking_sphinx(sphinx engine) or sunspot_solr(java lucene solr engine).

I'll be using Searchlogic and will_paginate in this demo.

#install searchlogic

sudo gem install searchlogic


#install will_paginate

gem sources -a http://gemcutter.org

sudo gem install will_paginate

Then add the gem to the environment file.

#config/environment.rb


config.gem "binarylogic-searchlogic", :lib => "searchlogic"

config.gem 'will_paginate', :version => '~> 2.3.11'

If you prefer to use github or the plugin version, check out their docs. I also suggest reading their docs to learn more about all the neat functions Searchlogic can do. It's a very powerful and useful plugin.

We'll be adding the search to Posts, so let's start by adding the search route to our posts.

#config/routes.rb


map.resources :posts, :collection => { :search => [ :post, :get ] }

This will give you the path /posts/search GET and POST.

Next add the search method to the PostsController.

#app/controllers/posts_controller.rb


class PostsController < ApplicationController

  def index

    @posts = Post.paginate(:all, :order => 'created_at desc', :per_page => 25, :page => params[:page])

  end

  def search

    if request.post?

      #pass the post into a get with the 'q' param

      redirect_to search_posts_path(:q => params[:search][:query])

    elsif request.get?

      unless params[:q].blank?

        #Searchlogics title_like_all to search within titles in the Post model for any of the words in the query.

        #words in the string are split into an array by spaces

        search = Post.title_like_all(params[:q].to_s.split).descend_by_created_at

        #paginate the results

        @posts = search.paginate(:per_page => 25, :page => params[:page])

        #pass the query object to the view to let the user know what they searched for

        @query = params[:q]

      end

      #render the Post index.html.erb

      render 'index'

    end

  end

end

The last part is the search form in your view.

	<% form_for :search, :url => { :controller => 'posts', :action => 'search' } do |f| %>

		<%= f.text_field :query, :value => @query%>

		<%= f.submit "Search", :disable_with => "Searching..."  %>

	<% end %>

I have the Voigtlander Nokton 50/f1.1 for the next week and I'm planning on running several rolls side-by-side against my Zeiss Planar 50/f2.

I'm considering replacing the Planar with this so we'll see. I'm a little skeptical though, since Zeiss bokeh is pretty hard to beat imo.

Stay tuned for results and photos!

I've become so normalized to formatting and wiping my OS clean every year/update during my Windows days that I decided to do the same with Snow Leopard. I also decided it would be a great time to upgrade the harddrive in my laptop to the WD 320gb 7200rpm.

After finishing that I followed the guides over at Hivelogic to get everything setup and running again. One thing to note was installing a ruby 1.8.6 since Snow Leopard by default installs 1.8.7 and my production server is running on Ruby Enterprise(1.8.6).

Compiling Ruby, RubyGems, and Rails on Snow Leopard
Compiling MySQL on Snow Leopard
Compiling Git on Snow Leopard