How to search for a text with Active Record in Ruby on Rails 3?

Question

How do I search for a string in Ruby on Rails?

For example, all records with columns that contains "text".

Does Active Record have a method for it or do I have to use SQL "LIKE" for it?

Answer 1

 Model.find(:all, :conditions => ['name LIKE ?', "%#{tag}%"])

Where tag is your variable containing the string

as per @bjg comment:-

Or in Rails 3 you'd write this as

  Model.where(["name LIKE :tag", {:tag => tag}]) 

using the new finder syntax –

Answer 2

you can also use Arel's 'match' method:

Model.match(:name => tag)

if you want to search in all columns, then you should write some extra code.

Answer 3

Sql like may be very inefficient in some cases, for example in many cases in MySQL. I recommend using some full-text indexing software like Sphinx, Xapian or Lucene.

Answer 4

I think acts_as_ferret plugin would be perfect for your needs, this plugin allow you to configure easily very cool indexes like

ActsAsFerret::define_index( 'my_index',
                        :models => {
                          SomeModel => {
                            :fields => {
                              :name => { :boost => 4, :store => :yes, :via => :ferret_title },
                              :foo => { :store => :no,  :index => :untokenized },
                              :baz => { :store => :yes, :via => :ferret_content }
                            }
                          }
                        } )

All acts_as_ferret indexes are configured in a single file, RAILS_ROOT/config/aaf.rb

• find this tutorial it looks nice full text search in ruby on rails 3 (ferret)

• Github source: http://github.com/jkraemer/acts_as_ferret/tree/rails3

• The original plugin: http://ferret.davebalmain.com/trac/wiki/FerretOnRails