Koren Leslie Cohen

33 comments

Ruby / Rails

Creating a Simple Search in Rails 4

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rails

Say you have a blog and you want the user to be able to search your posts, you will need to add methods to both your posts controller and post model, and create a corresponding search form.

1. Posts Controller

In your posts_controller.rb file, add the following to your index method:

def index
  @posts = Post.all
  if params[:search]
    @posts = Post.search(params[:search]).order("created_at DESC")
  else
    @posts = Post.all.order('created_at DESC')
  end
end
2. Post Model

In your post.rb file, add the following method:

def self.search(search)
  where("name LIKE ?", "%#{search}%") 
  where("content LIKE ?", "%#{search}%")
end

You can choose the fields you’d like your search form to query. In the above example, the search term will be run against both the name field and the content field of each post.  If the search term appears in either of those fields, there will be a match.

Note: this will work in development with SQLite. If you switch to PostgreSQL in production, you may need to change LIKE to ILIKE.

3. Search Form

In your views/posts/index.html.erb (or wherever you’d like to place the search form), add the following simple form:

<%= form_tag(posts_path, :method => "get", id: "search-form") do %>
<%= text_field_tag :search, params[:search], placeholder: "Search Posts" %>
<%= submit_tag "Search" %>
<% end %>
4. Render Results

In addition to rendering search results, it’s nice to let the user know when there are no matching results. You can accomplish this by adding the following under the above form:

<% if @posts.present? %>
  <%= render @posts %>
<% else %>
  <p>There are no posts containing the term(s) <%= params[:search] %>.</p>
<% end %>

In the above method, you are instructing your program to display the posts if there are matching posts (the above code calls a partial _post.html.erb which actually renders the results), or let the user know there are no posts containing the searched terms.

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  3. The search method should concatenate the results or use an ‘or’ query. In Rails 4.2, it will only return results from the last where statement. Matches in the first statement are not returned.

    Reply

  4. some reason I had to do this to get it working, anyways thanks for the help

    where(“content LIKE ? OR name LIKE ?”, “%#{search}%”, “%#{search}%”)

    Reply

  5. For some reason when I paste the Render Results, it gives me this error.

    “SQLite3::SQLException: no such column: content: SELECT “posts”.* FROM “posts” WHERE (content LIKE ‘%ok%’) ORDER BY created_at DESC

    There are no posts containing the term(s) .”
    And it highlights the “if posts.present?” part

    Reply

  6. Hi,

    Nice tutorial!
    I think you don’t need line 2 “@posts = Post.all” in your posts_controller.rb.

    Regards.

    Reply

    • Thanks for highlighting the list() meohtd. I had been pulling my hair trying to access parameters sent from jquery having names of the form “parameterName[]”. The list() meohtd turned out to be what the doctor ordered.

      Reply

    • Yup, completely unnecessary to perform a full search for all Posts before checking if the search parameter is present. It ends up looking for posts twice whether search is present or not.

      Reply

  9. Good stuff, though I believe that the method should be “where(“name || content LIKE ?”, “%#{search}%”)”, or else the method is just going to return results for the content search?

    Reply

    • Wow, most useful. Can’t rembmeer how many times I’ve written something like this to handle checkbox/multiple select logic. Thank you very much and keep up the good work. 🙂

      Reply

  10. Hi Koren how about if I have category_name from another table: category, how I write this on the model

    def self.search(search)
    where(“name LIKE ?”, “%#{search}%”)
    where(“category_name LIKE ?”, “%#{search}%”) ==>>
    end

    Reply

  11. This is a very helpful post! I have a question though. How would I make the search bar work if I am looking for attributes across multiple models? Your example is dealing only with the Post model, however, how would you be able to have the search bar work for another model as well, say for example I had a User model and I wanted the search bar to be able to also handle searches for user names ? Thanks 🙂

    Reply

  12. For any other copy-paste demons out there, when copying Brandon’s “where(“name || content LIKE ?”, “%#{search}%”)”the double-quotes turned into double apostrophes or whatever so look out for that. Fixed that and now I can search on either name or zip in my rails app.I could not get Richard’s selector to work.

    Reply

  16. Hi Koren! Thanks for this (and for your work at DSC, y’all have the best UX Design I’ve ever encountered, I’ll be a member forever)! Here’s an odd bug I’m encountering:

    I’ve retooled this for my list of customers. If I pass through a list of parameters, ie email, phone, lname, fname, etc., and a user is missing data for any of those parameters, it prevents them from being returned. So, for example, I have a customer named John Doe. If John Doe’s profile on the site is missing an email address, then a search for John or Doe won’t return him if one of the parameters is email.

    Here’s the code:

    models/customer.rb
    def self.search(search)
    where(“phone || lastName || email LIKE ?”, “%#{search}%”)
    end

    controllers/customer_controller.rb:
    def index
    if params[:search]
    @customers = Customer.search(params[:search]).order(“created_at DESC”)
    else
    @customers = Customer.all
    end
    end

    Any thoughts?

    Reply

    • You could make methods for phone, lastName, and email that check for the presence of those attributes. If they’re not present, return a dummy string instead.

      This probably won’t work exactly as written but I hope it illustrates the idea.

      “`
      models/customer.rb
      def self.search(search)
      where(“phone || lastName || email LIKE ?”, “%#{search}%”)
      end

      private
      def email
      if email.present?
      email
      else
      ‘fakeemail@fake.com’
      end
      end

      //could maybe be refactored to this? not sure…
      def email
      email ||= ‘fakeemail@fake.com’
      end
      “`

      Reply

  21. In the controller, you can drop the line 2. For the model, just reuse this code:
    class Note < ApplicationRecord
    def self.search(search)
    where("content LIKE ? OR title LIKE ?", "%#{search}%", "%#{search}%")
    end
    end

    By the way, thanks for the post and to the commenters. Got my search engine to work. +1

    Reply

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