A hands-on tutoring needed

Rails
#1

dear each, and all and others,

being a completeest newbie to RoR and having got dumb by a month or so
of googling how to add search faculty to a web app, I ask you for
help.

All I got is a database of 200 records so there is no need for sphinxes,
sunspots, elasticsearches, searchlogics, ferrets and other highly
esteemed and advanced engines and plugins. Thank you, sir. No.

I humbly ask for a list of files (and their contents) to be added to a
new app for user to get/see table of rows after s/he fills
text_tag_field and clicks submit button.

Don’t send me to RailsEpisodes, please, I’ve sifted them with tons of
other crap.

yours,
sehrguey

#2

Hi Sehrguey,

On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 8:04 AM, sehrguey o. [email protected]
wrote:

dear each, and all and others,

being a completeest newbie to RoR and having got dumb by a month or so
of googling how to add search faculty to a web app, I ask you for
help.

All I got is a database of 200 records so there is no need for sphinxes,
sunspots, elasticsearches, searchlogics, ferrets and other highly
esteemed and advanced engines and plugins. Thank you, sir. No.

Were these records created with a Rails app? Do you have a basic
Rails app that you’re trying to extend with search functionality? Or
do you want to create a Rails app? What you want to do is very
simple. Just trying to understand your starting point.

Best regards,
Bill

#3

On Jul 1, 2012, at 9:04 AM, sehrguey o. wrote:

I humbly ask for a list of files (and their contents) to be added to a
new app for user to get/see table of rows after s/he fills
text_tag_field and clicks submit button.

I built something like this as my first paying Rails job, a couple
summers ago. I used Paperclip to store the external files in my mode, so
to get the content of the text files (in my case, they were PDFs), I
used a custom Paperclip processor (based on the Thumbnail processor that
comes with Paperclip) to pipe the content of each uploaded file through
the venerable pdftotext Unix command. https://gist.github.com/3028403

The results were not good enough to show the world (layout was
destroyed) but the text content was extracted into a plain_text
attribute on my model, and that’s what I searched within.

The very simplest search technique of all is the substring match. This
ignores dozens of years of search technology to simply answer the
question “is this string present anywhere within that string?” In SQL,
it looks like this: "SELECT * FROM foos WHERE bar LIKE ‘%baz%’. In
Rails 3+, you would write this in your controller like this:

@foos = Foo.where([“bar LIKE ‘%?%’”,params[:q]])

Hope that’s enough to get you started. There’s also a number of
Railscast episodes about this, starting with this humble substring
match, and enumerating some simple Gems that can remove the grunt-work
for you, like MetaSearch.

Walter

#4

Hello Bill,

sometime ago I hacked the database structure from Kevin Yank’s tutorial
“Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL” to use it for
a database at my site and it works OK storing and delivering a hundred
plus of records in the database I needed.

However I haven’t deployed it, because of the rumors about the Glossy
Shining Kingdom of RoR that made me wade through a couple of startup
tutorials and Hurtl’s Book.

I liked the RoR way but all the tuts I found were about blogs and
cookbooks and twitter-like apps without search funtionality.
How to add this feature to a basic RoR app after generating a model?

Yours`

sehrguey

#5

dear Walter,

thank you for your kind attention and readiness to help.

You talked about my controller and proposed an awesomely nice line:

“ @foos = Foo.where([“bar LIKE ‘%?%’”,params[:q]])”

Unfortunately, it is not enough to get me started because I can’t
imagine where on earth to stick it into my controller that runs as
follows:

"class DisksController < ApplicationController

GET /disks

GET /disks.json

def index
@disks = Disk.search(params[:search])

respond_to do |format|
  format.html # index.html.erb
  format.json { render json: @disks }
end

end

GET /disks/1

GET /disks/1.json

def show
@disk = Disk.find(params[:id])

respond_to do |format|
  format.html # show.html.erb
  format.json { render json: @disk }
end

end

GET /disks/new

GET /disks/new.json

def new
@disk = Disk.new

respond_to do |format|
  format.html # new.html.erb
  format.json { render json: @disk }
end

end

GET /disks/1/edit

def edit
@disk = Disk.find(params[:id])
end

POST /disks

POST /disks.json

def create
@disk = Disk.new(params[:disk])

respond_to do |format|
  if @disk.save
    format.html { redirect_to @disk, notice: 'Disk was successfully

created.’ }
format.json { render json: @disk, status: :created, location:
@disk }
else
format.html { render action: “new” }
format.json { render json: @disk.errors, status:
:unprocessable_entity }
end
end
end

PUT /disks/1

PUT /disks/1.json

def update
@disk = Disk.find(params[:id])

respond_to do |format|
  if @disk.update_attributes(params[:disk])
    format.html { redirect_to @disk, notice: 'Disk was successfully

updated.’ }
format.json { head :no_content }
else
format.html { render action: “edit” }
format.json { render json: @disk.errors, status:
:unprocessable_entity }
end
end
end

DELETE /disks/1

DELETE /disks/1.json

def destroy
@disk = Disk.find(params[:id])
@disk.destroy

respond_to do |format|
  format.html { redirect_to disks_url }
  format.json { head :no_content }
end

end
end"

yours`
sehrguey

#6

Did you watch this one
http://railscasts.com/episodes/111-advanced-search-form
for a search without plugins, I think it covers well the basics of the
subject to let you improve it.

this is the “advanced search form” episode.
If you were to find yourself a bit lost, there is a “simple search form
one”
http://railscasts.com/episodes/37-simple-search-form

(those are old episode in rails 1 or rails 2, so there is a little bit
of
transcription to make, but it should be pretty easy to follow still)

#7

On Jul 2, 2012, at 1:42 PM, sehrguey o. wrote:

follows:

"class DisksController < ApplicationController

GET /disks

GET /disks.json

def index
@disks = Disk.search(params[:search])

The preceding line is already what I described. You have defined a
self.search method in your disk.rb file (or else this line wouldn’t
work). That seems like you’ve already got the basics of a search
function ready to go. Can I see the content of disk.rb?

Walter

#8

dear Gregory,

I watched both episodes you mentioned, they did not work for me, I
couldn’t figure out where the views come into play, which model stores
the searched items and what is in the controller of that invisible
model.

yours`
sehrguey

#9

On Jul 3, 2012, at 1:16 PM, sehrguey o. wrote:

else
find(:all)
end
end
end

This is putting the search method where it belongs, in the model, rather
than inline in the controller, as I had it. Completely identical in
every functional way, just better MVC layout this way. So the only other
question here is, do you have a form on your index page layout that can
set a params[:search] with the desired search term? If you’ve looked at
the RailsCast, there’s a nice easy snippet there to make it with the
form_tag helper (useful because you don’t have an associated model). Can
you show that code here?

You want to issue a GET request from the form to the index method, and
then this will all just work. Your self.search method will default to
gathering all records, because the query is ‘WHERE name LIKE “%%”’,
which matches everything in the table. When you do pass a querystring to
it that’s like ?search=foo, then you will get the records where name
contains foo. This means that there’s no need for an additional
controller method or a separate route or template for search results. If
you do want to specialize the results page, you could do something in
the index.html.erb template to switch on the presence of a
params[:search] variable, and use that to change the page title or
header or both.

Walter

#10

Hi Walter,

there is form_tag in the index view`


<%= form_tag disks_path, :method => 'get' do %>

<%= text_field_tag :search, params[:search] %> <%= submit_tag "Search", :name => nil %>

<% end %>

<%= link_to ‘New Disk’, new_disk_path %>

but when I try to put it to use it raises
“ArgumentError in DisksController#index
Unknown key: condition”.
I can read the message yet I don’t know what to do.

yours`
sehrguey

#11

Walter,
here is the contents of my disk.rb

class Disk < ActiveRecord::Base
attr_accessible :director, :language, :notes, :starring, :title,
:volume_name, :wrapper

def self.search(search)
if search
find(:all, :condition=>[‘name LIKE ?’, “%#{search}%”])
else
find(:all)
end
end
end

yours`
sehrguey

#12

thank you, Walter,

it worked after I had corrected the shameful typo and replaced ‘name’
with 'title’further along the line.

I feel embarrassed and obliged or, maybe, vice verse.

gratefully yours`

sehrguey

#13

Make that :conditions rather than :condition, and you’re done.

Walter

#14

On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 1:52 PM, sehrguey o. [email protected]
wrote:

Now what?

yours`
sehrguey

This is why you are getting all the records, if there’s no “search” then
it
will find all the records.

else
  find(:all)
end

You can send an empty array or whatever you want, or maybe you can
handle
that in the controller

Javier Q.

#15

happy moments are too short…

the search form worked and still works but it has a major flaw - when
the text_field_tag is left blank then all the db raws pop up on hitting
submit button.
How to prevent it?

I tried to substitute ‘if (search.present?)’ for just ‘if search’ in
disk.rb (the googled out trick seemed so logical) yet it availed of
nothing and all the records were displayed again.

Now what?

yours`
sehrguey

#16

Javier Q. wrote in post #1067748:

You can send an empty array or whatever you want, or maybe you can
handle
that in the controller

Walter D. wrote:

You could kink the form to only submit if there is a value in the search
field, you would do that with JavaScript. Something like this (inline)
or better you would use Prototype or jQuery to write an unobtrusive
handler.

O weh, dear sirs,

If I could I would but before I should know the way to. Presently I
consider your enlightened talk with awe like some heaven dwellers’
parlance incomprehensible for mere mortals.
OK. I asked Google about sending arrays in rails and got another bowl of
geek-talk and changed ‘else find(:all)’ to whatever I wanted just to be
punished for transgressions of convention over configuration.
Then I added unobtrusive addition to form_tag which seasoning brought no
changes to conventional displaying of everything not searched for.

Of course, RoR has means and ways to solve a petty problem like this
one. The only queston is` ‘where to discover?’

yours`
sehrguey

#17

On 8 July 2012 07:33, sehrguey o. [email protected] wrote:

or better you would use Prototype or jQuery to write an unobtrusive
Then I added unobtrusive addition to form_tag which seasoning brought no
changes to conventional displaying of everything not searched for.

Of course, RoR has means and ways to solve a petty problem like this
one. The only queston is` ‘where to discover?’

I would start by working right through some good Ruby tutorials (to
understand the language better) and also through some good Rails
tutorials (railstutorial.org is good and is free to use online) to
understand the Rails magic. Take a week out to do that and then you
should be good to tackle a multitude of problems.

Also monitor this list. Any time that you understand the question
then follow the replies and attempt to understand the answers. That
way you will learn a lot. In no time you will find yourself answering
questions.

Colin

#18

Your controller is using this method to load results on your index page,
whether or not any search was performed. So it’s perfectly reasonable
for the empty search to return all results.

def self.search(search)
if search
find(:all, :conditions=>[‘name LIKE ?’, “%#{search}%”])
else
find(:all)
end
end
end

def index
@disks = Disk.search(params[:search]) # <-- right here

respond_to do |format|
format.html # index.html.erb
format.json { render json: @disks }
end
end

If you kink the self.search method to only return results if there is a
non-empty search request, then you will never see anything on your
normal index view unless a search request has been entered.

You could kink the form to only submit if there is a value in the search
field, you would do that with JavaScript. Something like this (inline)
or better you would use Prototype or jQuery to write an unobtrusive
handler.

<%= form_tag disks_path, :method => ‘get’, :onsubmit => “return
(this.search.value != ‘’)” do %>

Walter

#19

Colin L. wrote in post #1067862:

I would start by working right through some good Ruby tutorials (to
understand the language better) and also through some good Rails
tutorials (railstutorial.org is good and is free to use online) to
understand the Rails magic.

thank you Colin,

you are right railstutorial.org is outright good and I did all of it.
Unfortunately, it has no search form whatsoever. Neither do intensely
good tutorials at guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html

That’s why I knocked at this here forum asking for help of those who
understand the language and the Rails better.

yours`
sehrguey