{"id":26504,"date":"2017-03-28T17:44:36","date_gmt":"2017-03-28T17:44:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev.railscarma.com\/how-to-use-textacular-gem-to-search-data-in-your-rails-application\/"},"modified":"2021-06-05T09:13:26","modified_gmt":"2021-06-05T09:13:26","slug":"how-to-use-textacular-gem-to-search-data-in-your-rails-application","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.railscarma.com\/es\/blog\/articulos-tecnicos\/how-to-use-textacular-gem-to-search-data-in-your-rails-application\/","title":{"rendered":"How to use Textacular Gem to search data in your Rails Application"},"content":{"rendered":"
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We might have heard about a lot many gems which let us implement search functionality in our rails application; for example: searchkick, elasticsearch-rails, ransack and finally, sunspot to work with solr search engine. All these gems have their own advantages. Both searchkick and elasticsearch use redis to search the data as well as need to perform a \u2018reindex\u2019 while inserting new data. In one of my recent projects, I happened to use a gem called as Textacular. It\u2019s simple and very easy to use.<\/p>\n\n

Textacular Gem:<\/h3>\nIt is a gem that provides full text search capabilities for PostgreSQL Database. It basically caters to extend the scope of the work performed by activerecord, in a rather friendly manner. It works on heroku as well.\nThis gem works only on PostgreSQL\nFor working with it, let’s first grab the latest textacular gem from https:\/\/rubygems.org\/gems\/textacular and add it to the gemfile.\n
gem 'textacular'\n      bundle install<\/code><\/pre>\nTextacular gem provides us with quite a few methods to search the data. So, all our models have the access to use those methods.\n\n basic_search\nadvanced_search\nfuzzy_search<\/strong>\n\nUso:<\/strong>\nBasic_search:<\/strong> It searches based on the input text.\n
User.basic_search(\u2018abc\u2019) # Searches on all the model column attributes<\/code><\/pre>\n
User.basic_search(last_name: 'abc', first_name: 'xyz')<\/code><\/pre>\nAdvanced_search:<\/strong> Here, we can use postgres syntaxes like !, & and | (and, or and, not) and then, some others based on the requirement. It converts user\u2019s search DSL into Pg syntax. For this, we need to make sure that the necessary exceptions should be used to handle the syntax errors.\n
User.advanced_search(last_name: 'text1|text2\u2019) - It searches with the text1 or text2 on last_name on User model.<\/code><\/pre>\n
User.advanced_search(last_name: '!text2\u2019) - It searches for the records whose last_name is not text2.<\/code><\/pre>\nThese searches can be chainable as shown below:\n
User.advanced_search(last_name: 'text1|text2\u2019).basic_search(last_name: 'abc', first_name: 'xyz')<\/code><\/pre>\nFuzzy_search:<\/strong>\nWe need to install pg_trgm module to work with fuzzy_search. Run the command below to install this module. It searches for partial appearance of your text in the DB.\n
rake textacular:create_trigram_migration  \nrake db:migrate<\/code><\/pre>\nNow, we are ready to use fuzzy_search.\n
User.fuzzy_search('Lorem')<\/code><\/pre>\nBy default, fuzzy search, searches for the records which are 30% of the search text matches with respect to the entire content. We can set this threshold limit by using the command below.\n
ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute(\"SELECT set_limit(0.6);\")<\/code><\/pre>\nSo, it expects 60% of search text to match with the original content.\nWe can use OR condition to search on multiple columns. Need to pass a hash with columns with input text as param one and pass second param as a false. It takes AND, if you miss second param or if it True.\n
User.fuzzy_search({first_name: 'user', last_name: 'test'}, false)<\/code><\/pre>\n
User.fuzzy_search(first_name: \u2018user\u2019, last_name: 'test') - It takes AND condition.<\/code><\/pre>\nBy default, the Textacular searches in all text and string columns. We can alter its default behaviour by overriding the searchable_columns method in the model.\n
def self.searchable_columns\n    [:title, :body] \nend<\/code><\/pre>\nWe can override self.searchable_language in the model to set proper dictionary settings.\n
def self.searchable_language \n   'arabic' \nend<\/code><\/pre>\nPlease check gem official documents for global search and more.\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Suscr\u00edbete para recibir las \u00faltimas actualizaciones<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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