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textacular

Further documentation available at http://textacular.github.com/textacular.

DESCRIPTION:

Textacular exposes full text search capabilities from PostgreSQL, extending ActiveRecord with scopes making search easy and fun!

FEATURES/PROBLEMS:

  • Only works with PostgreSQL

SYNOPSIS:

Quick Start

Rails 3 (or 4!)

In the project's Gemfile add

gem 'textacular', '~> 3.0'

ActiveRecord outside of Rails

require 'textacular'

ActiveRecord::Base.extend(Textacular)

Usage

Your models now have access to search methods:

The #basic_search method is what you might expect: it looks literally for what you send to it, doing nothing fancy with the input:

Game.basic_search('Sonic') # will search through the model's :string columns
Game.basic_search(title: 'Mario', system: 'Nintendo')

The #advanced_search method lets you use Postgres's search syntax like '|', '&' and '!' ('or', 'and', and 'not') as well as some other craziness. The ideal use for advanced_search is to take a search DSL you make up for your users and translate it to PG's syntax. If for some reason you want to put user input directly into an advanced search, you should be sure to catch exceptions from syntax errors. Check [the Postgres docs] (http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/datatype-textsearch.html) for more:

Game.advanced_search(title: 'Street|Fantasy')
Game.advanced_search(system: '!PS2')

Finally, the #fuzzy_search method lets you use Postgres's trigram search functionality.

In order to use this, you'll need to make sure your database has the pg_trgm module installed. Create and run a migration to install the module:

rake textacular:create_trigram_migration
rake db:migrate

Once that's installed, you can use it like this:

Comic.fuzzy_search(title: 'Questio') # matches Questionable Content

Note that fuzzy searches are subject to a similarity threshold imposed by the pg_trgm module. The default is 0.3, meaning that at least 30% of the total string must match your search content. For example:

Comic.fuzzy_search(title: 'Pearls') # matches Pearls Before Swine
Comic.fuzzy_search(title: 'Pear') # does not match Pearls Before Swine

The similarity threshold is hardcoded in PostgreSQL and can be modified on a per-connection basis, for example:

ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("SELECT set_limit(0.9);")

For more info, view the pg_trgm documentation, specifically F.35.2. Functions and Operators.

Searches are also chainable:

Game.fuzzy_search(title: 'tree').basic_search(system: 'SNES')

If you want to search on two or more fields with the OR operator use a hash for the conditions and pass false as the second parameter:

Game.basic_search({name: 'Mario', nickname: 'Mario'}, false)

Setting Language

To set proper searching dictionary just override class method on your model:

def self.searchable_language
  'russian'
end

And all your queries would go right! And don`t forget to change the migration for indexes, like shown below.

Creating Indexes for Super Speed

You can have Postgresql use an index for the full-text search. To declare a full-text index, in a migration add code like the following:

execute "
    create index on email_logs using gin(to_tsvector('english', subject));
    create index on email_logs using gin(to_tsvector('english', email_address));"

In the above example, the table email_logs has two text columns that we search against, subject and email_address. You will need to add an index for every text/string column you query against, or else Postgresql will revert to a full table scan instead of using the indexes.

If you create these indexes, you should also switch to sql for your schema_format in config/application.rb:

config.active_record.schema_format = :sql

REQUIREMENTS:

  • ActiveRecord
  • Ruby 1.9.2

INSTALL:

$ gem install textacular

Contributing

Help is gladly welcomed. If you have a feature you'd like to add, it's much more likely to get in (or get in faster) the closer you stick to these steps:

  1. Open an Issue to talk about it. We can discuss whether it's the right direction or maybe help track down a bug, etc.
  2. Fork the project, and make a branch to work on your feature/fix. Master is where you'll want to start from.
  3. Write a test for the feature you are about to add
  4. Run the tests
  5. Turn the Issue into a Pull Request. There are several ways to do this, but hub is probably the easiest.
  6. Bonus points if your Pull Request updates CHANGES.md to include a summary of your changes and your name like the other entries. If the last entry is the last release, add a new ## Unreleased heading.

If you don't know how to fix something, even just a Pull Request that includes a failing test can be helpful. If in doubt, make an Issue to discuss.

LICENSE:

(The MIT License)

Copyright (c) 2011 Aaron Patterson

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.