# Newbe question

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/newbe-question/195616>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [September 27, 2010, 12:38am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/newbe-question/195616 "2010-09-27T00:38:04Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 6\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![dazuma](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dazuma](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dazuma)\
**Post date:** [September 27, 2010, 12:38am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/newbe-question/195616/1 "2010-09-27T00:38:04Z")

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Hello everybody,

I’m new to ROR and i’m building a test “job board” project just to see  
how far i wil come with ruby. i’m already familiar with the MVC model  
(currently using Zend Framework) and RESTfull webservices and i’m very  
exited about rails.

Everything works out fine with the “job board” app but i want to make  
the job search a little smarter. i want to create an search and filter  
on this page. Something like a tag system or just some keywords like  
salary, city, category…etc. but after the keyword i want to show the  
amount of jobs under this keyword and if a keyword is selected the  
amount of jobs for other keywords or tags has to bee recalculated with  
the given keywords.

How would you guys create such a system “the rails way” ? is there a  
good search plugin for this or do i have to take a closer look to  
ActiveRecord?

Thx in advance!

Greetings, Daniel

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**Author:** ![dazuma](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dazuma](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dazuma)\
**Post date:** [September 27, 2010, 8:43am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/newbe-question/195616/2 "2010-09-27T08:43:19Z")

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sine you need to learn and develope the system, i’m reccomend to do your  
self. then you will be expert on this.  
try your self and let us know if you stuck some whre. we will help you.

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**Author:** ![dazuma](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dazuma](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dazuma)\
**Post date:** [September 27, 2010, 7:29pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/newbe-question/195616/3 "2010-09-27T19:29:07Z")

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You’re right…

I will figure out active record to make this happen.

Greetz

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**Author:** ![dazuma](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dazuma](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dazuma)\
**Post date:** [September 28, 2010, 2:37pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/newbe-question/195616/4 "2010-09-28T14:37:37Z")

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Daniel, Please post some of your findings here when you find  
something. I would love to see it.

Thanks

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**Author:** ![dazuma](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dazuma](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dazuma)\
**Post date:** [September 28, 2010, 3:51pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/newbe-question/195616/5 "2010-09-28T15:51:42Z")

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I think one of your key design decisions up front is who defines the  
tags/keywords?

If it is left up to the users to enter tags, then you might look into  
the has\_many\_polymorphs gem and the tagging facilities available there.  
This case makes it a tad more difficult to deal with searches, because  
your users can enter tags willy-nilly, and you have to come up with some  
method of classifying them, ideally dealing with synonyms and  
misspellings.

User-defined tags opens you up to some, er, inappropriate tags as well  
if your application is ever found out by the spam-spiders that crawl the  
web (a blacklist of tags to ignore would be your friend in this case I  
think).

If you are defining the keywords, it becomes much more manageable, and  
you can classify the tags you support according to types… salary  
ranges, experience levels, locations, whatever. I usually include  
something like a code table in my apps, where I can setup a codetype  
(string), codevalue (int), and codetext (string) where I could enter  
things like below that can be used in droplists for selection of  
attributes.

type, value, text:  
“salary”, 1, “30-40k”  
“salary”, 2, “40-50k”  
blah blah blah  
“experience”, 1, “1-3 years”  
“experience”, 2, “4-6 years”  
etc, etc

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![dazuma](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dazuma](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dazuma)\
**Post date:** [October 2, 2010, 2:11pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/newbe-question/195616/6 "2010-10-02T14:11:01Z")

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Thank you Ar Chron for your suggestion and for mr.whinnymann: i was just  
playing with rails and a job board app is a good project to figure out  
rails  
(or a blog / webshop). So i’m sorry that i can’t paste some code…

I started this disscusion because there are so many good plugins and i  
saw  
plugin’s like search\_logic etc so i just wanted to know if there would  
be a  
great plugin that would help me with the job board project and i could  
figure it out how plugins work in rails etc.

currenly i’m trying to set up a connection to mysql witch just won’t  
work…and still reading tuts about rails and try them out. Have to say  
that  
i like rails so far.

Greets, Daniel

2010/9/28 Ar Chron [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid)