Multiple Models w/ acts_as_ferret

ASRoth · February 28, 2006, 6:58am

I have multiple models all with:

acts_as_ferret :fields => […]

(models = profiles, blogs, comments )

When I restart the server and perform any crud operation on one of the
above models, the index is created/updated. If I then go and perform
any crud operation on ANOTHER model, …the index from that first model
is being updated.

Any ideas? Can acts_as_ferret handle this?

Thanks
Adam

ASRoth · February 28, 2006, 12:09pm

On 2/28/06, A. Roth [email protected] wrote:

is being updated.

Any ideas? Can acts_as_ferret handle this?

Hi Adam,

I’m assuming here that you used the acts_as_ferret code on the lower
part of this page;

http://ferret.davebalmain.com/trac/wiki/FerretOnRails

There should only be one index for all models, not one index each.
Each document in the index contains a ferret_class field which will
contain the name of the model so searches on a specific model will
only find documents for that model. I hope that makes sense. Basically
there should be one index that gets updated whenever any of the models
are updated.

Cheers,
Dave

ASRoth · February 28, 2006, 4:11pm

Hi David,

Yes… that makes sense. Why, however, are there directories created for
each model in RAILS_ROOT/index/RAILS_ENV if only one is needed? The
first model hit will be the index that is written to for all models
(like I had mentioned). Is that correct? For example:

I start up the server
A “blog” page is hit and updated
The index in RAILS_ROOT/index/Development/Blog is updated
A “comment” page is updated
The index is RAILS_ROOT/index/Development/Blog is updated again,
despite there being a /Development/Comment dir.

I’m probably missing something. I would appriciate if you could fill in
my understanding based on my comments above.

Thanks you in advance.

Adam

David B. wrote:

On 2/28/06, A. Roth [email protected] wrote:

is being updated.

Any ideas? Can acts_as_ferret handle this?

Hi Adam,

I’m assuming here that you used the acts_as_ferret code on the lower
part of this page;

http://ferret.davebalmain.com/trac/wiki/FerretOnRails

There should only be one index for all models, not one index each.
Each document in the index contains a ferret_class field which will
contain the name of the model so searches on a specific model will
only find documents for that model. I hope that makes sense. Basically
there should be one index that gets updated whenever any of the models
are updated.

Cheers,
Dave

ASRoth · February 28, 2006, 11:21pm

Also, I was using the version found here:

https://svn.jkraemer.net/svn/projects/ferret-demo/trunk/vendor/plugins/acts_as_ferret/

His changelog mentions how the index per model structure… should I be
using the one on the wiki page?

Adam

ASRoth · March 1, 2006, 12:37am

One other thing. When you say the blog index is being updated when you
modify comments, does that mean only the blog index ever gets updated?
Does the comments index remains empty?

ASRoth · March 1, 2006, 12:35am

Hi Adam,

That version is supposed to work with seperate indexes. I had a quick
look at the code but I’m not sure what is wrong. Perhaps you could
drop Jens an email about it. Or you could try the other acts_as_ferret
plugin. Sorry I can’t be of more help.

Cheers,
Dave

ASRoth · March 1, 2006, 12:39am

aroth wrote:

Also, I was using the version found here:

https://svn.jkraemer.net/svn/projects/ferret-demo/trunk/vendor/plugins/acts_as_ferret/

Actually, I believe he merged bits and pieces from both versions on the
wiki along with some of his own changes. I haven’t looked closely at the
code, yet, but I from an initial glance it looks like it incorporates my
additions pretty cleanly. I’m not quite certain why you would be seeing
the behavior described. Could you post some snippets from your code
(like the acts_as_ferret lines from each model and any configuration
from environment.rb)?

Jens just recently set up this SVN repository and gave Kasper and I
access to it for furthur updates – this will be the source for future
versions of the plugin. One of us will hopefully be updating the wiki
soon to reflect this.

Thomas

ASRoth · March 1, 2006, 6:50am

David B. wrote:

One other thing. When you say the blog index is being updated when you
modify comments, does that mean only the blog index ever gets updated?
Does the comments index remains empty?

I used the second block of code on the wiki and it now works with 1
index… however, I can’t seem to get any results back. Editing any of
the models forces the index to update, so I know something is going on.
Hopefully you guys can answer a few questions:

Are all the “fields” of a model indexed? When I used that
acts_as_ferret code from the svn repository, I had to specify the
fields. And despite the problems, I was also getting results back.
Is there a way to limit the results that you get back? (IE, limit to
10, or pass a limit/offset for paging).
Is there a way I can “dump” the information Ferret has indexed so
that I can see if the correct data is there? I’d like to figure out why
no results are coming back from:

def test_ferret
@results = Comment.find_by_contents( params[‘query’] )
render_text @results.inspect
end

Thanks again.
Adam

ASRoth · March 1, 2006, 6:19pm

We have also been using our own version of acts_as_ferret, put
together from the wiki and a version that was on the rails mailing
list. We added a simple rake task for rebuilding the index and
pagination. We kept the one index for all models as I expect Ferret
to be fast enough to handle it and maybe we’ll want to query across
models one day.

I tried to checkout the code from
https://svn.jkraemer.net/svn/projects/ferret-demo/trunk/vendor/plugins/acts_as_ferret/
but it is requiring a username and password, even though I can access
it fine through the web. I was hoping I could send you some diffs for
some of the things we’ve done. Is there a guest account I could use
to checkout?

Thanks

-Lee

ASRoth · March 1, 2006, 3:23pm

On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 06:50:46AM +0100, Adam R. wrote:

Is there a way I can “dump” the information Ferret has indexed so
that I can see if the correct data is there? I’d like to figure out why
no results are coming back from:

def test_ferret
@results = Comment.find_by_contents( params[‘query’] )
render_text @results.inspect
end

you can use Luke (http://www.getopt.org/luke/) to inspect an existing
ferret index.

I’ll try to reproduce and fix the problems you had concerning multiple
indexes/classes with the acts_as_ferret version from the svn repository.

Jens

–
webit! Gesellschaft für neue Medien mbH www.webit.de
Dipl.-Wirtschaftsingenieur Jens Krämer [email protected]
Schnorrstraße 76 Tel +49 351 46766 0
D-01069 Dresden Fax +49 351 46766 66

ASRoth · March 1, 2006, 7:07pm

On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 10:18:10AM -0700, Lee M. wrote:

it fine through the web. I was hoping I could send you some diffs for
some of the things we’ve done. Is there a guest account I could use
to checkout?

Ooops, my mistake, read-only access via svn should work now without any
authentication.

patches are welcome of course

btw: I just fixed the issue reported in this thread.

Jens

–
webit! Gesellschaft für neue Medien mbH www.webit.de
Dipl.-Wirtschaftsingenieur Jens Krämer [email protected]
Schnorrstraße 76 Tel +49 351 46766 0
D-01069 Dresden Fax +49 351 46766 66

ASRoth · March 2, 2006, 6:49pm

Jens,

Your fix works great. Thank you. Another quick question. I notice the
“rebuild_index.rb” in the plugin dir. If I try to run this directly, it
doesnt want to run (complains about not being able to require ‘ferret’).
Anyway, I’d like to know how I can use Ferret or acts_as_ferret to index
all of my existing content based on the fields/models I have declared as
‘acts_as_ferret’. Right now, they are added to the index after any CRUD
operation – is there a way to force this outside of the scope of the
web?

Thanks
Adam

ASRoth · March 1, 2006, 11:14pm

On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 06:50:46AM +0100, Adam R. wrote:
[…]

Are all the “fields” of a model indexed? When I used that
acts_as_ferret code from the svn repository, I had to specify the
fields. And despite the problems, I was also getting results back.

You have to specify the fields when using the second code snippet from
the wiki, too. If no fields are specified, only the id and the class
name will be indexed.

Is there a way to limit the results that you get back? (IE, limit to
10, or pass a limit/offset for paging).

I just added this to the svn version of the plugin.
You can have a look at test/unit/content_test.rb from the demo project
(https://svn.jkraemer.net/svn/projects/ferret-demo/trunk/test/unit/content_test.rb)
for an example.

As the other issue concerning multiple indexes is now fixed, too, you
could give the svn version another try.

Regards,
Jens

–
webit! Gesellschaft für neue Medien mbH www.webit.de
Dipl.-Wirtschaftsingenieur Jens Krämer [email protected]
Schnorrstraße 76 Tel +49 351 46766 0
D-01069 Dresden Fax +49 351 46766 66

ASRoth · March 3, 2006, 12:24am

Here is our rake task which uses a slightly different version of
acts_as_ferret. It will try to load up all models in app/models and
call ferret_update on each instance.

ASRoth · July 11, 2006, 7:28pm

So is it correct then that you have to use inheritance to get it to work
across multiple models?

Lee M. wrote:

Here is our rake task which uses a slightly different version of
acts_as_ferret. It will try to load up all models in app/models and
call ferret_update on each instance.